Bosnia and Herzegovina could lose 7.5 million euros of EU assistance for cencus

If BiH does not fulfill the necessary pre-conditions, it might lose the 7.5 million euros that EU planned to provide to support the census in our country. 

"As we announced earlier, the European Union is planning to make an additional 7.5 million EUR available to support the conduct of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina. These funds, in form of a grant to the BiH Agency for Statistics, would directly support census field work and would cover approximately 35% of the estimated total census costs”, FENA was told by the Spokesperson of the EU Delegation to BiH Andy McGuffie. This amount comes in addition to the 4.5 million EUR already provided by the EU for technical assistance, census related equipment and the support to the International Monitoring Operation. 

“We are increasingly concerned with delays by the BiH authorities in fulfilling the necessary pre-conditions to get this money. The census has already been postponed once and smooth action is required at all level of governments to ensure its implementation in October 2013”, warned the Spokesperson. He added it took the BiH authorities over a month to indicate their readiness to accept these additional funds. In order for the EU Delegation to make the money available the BiH authorities would now need to develop and adopt a financial plan for the census. 

“If this is not done within a matter of days, BiH runs the very real and serious risk of losing access to these funds. More generally, the lack of focus and effort needed to make the census happen on time needs to be turned around as a matter of utmost urgency”, said the Spokesperson of the EU Delegation to BiH Andy McGuffie. 

Source: fena.ba
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