Wednesday, May 16, 2018

The opening workshop of the Policy Research for Young Academics programme was held in Tirana on 16-18 May 2018. The training for 10 selected researchers was conducted by Mr. Eoin Young and Mr. Ashot Khurshudyan, both experts of the International Center for Policy Advocacy (ICPA), in consultation with PERFORM and Academy of Political Studies (ASP).

The focus of this opening workshop was to get researchers to understand the differences between standard academic methods and the applied approaches that a policy research project requires and also to set them up for the first stage of the programme, which requires them to work on a policy research proposal.

The workshop was run over 2.5 days with researchers attending for the first 2 days and then for the last half day, with the participation of the directors and experts of municipality of Tirana, in the role of commissioning partners. Researchers hadn’t previously been able to dig deep and understand the specifics of the policy problems that the municipality want researched, so this was a good opportunity to work through the issue and also make plans to co-operate in the development of the project. 

This program is funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and implemented by Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation in partnership with the University of Freiburg.