Work Package 8: Coordination

Coordination of meetings and workshops
The SEACRIFOG coordinators will organise and facilitate monthly virtual meetings of the project’s Executive Board via phone or internet and prepare and circulate the minute of these meetings. One Executive Board meeting per year will be a face-to-face meeting. At the beginning of the project a kickoff meeting with all project partners and stakeholders will be organised in East Africa. During the course of the project, the specific workshops as described in the work programmes of the individual WPs will be coordinated in such a way as to minimise the travel costs and to maximise the interaction between the individual WPs through merging some events and using the facilities of local partners.

Optimisation of the cooperation between the WPs and with external advisors
The project coordinators will monitor the project’s progress and support individual project partners in maintaining the timeline of those deliverables and milestones which serve as input for other tasks. They will set up a SEACRIFOG project homepage and develop a concept to maintain and update the website regularly and, ideally, also beyond the duration of the project. The website will host a project calendar with important dates of meetings, workshops, training schools etc., the work programme, descriptions of (and links to) the partner organisations, links to public workshop reports and a news corner with short reports about new project results. It will thus facilitate an efficient exchange of information between the WPs. External experts on environmental observation networks will be contacted actively by the coordinators in order to get the best possible support during project workshops and document writing.

Outreach and perspectives
The project coordination will disseminate the project results to the public and the stakeholders through the website and through press releases. It will further attempt, in close co-operation with WP7, to tackle relevant legislative issues of a long-term EU-African cooperation, e.g. by drafting a “memorandum of understanding” between the research ministries to signal a long-term commitment of the political actors. In this context it will also be investigated whether the founding and funding of “virtual institutes” can contribute to an affordable long-term strategy to institutionalise EU-African cooperation.