IREX recently brought together participants in the Southeastern European Communities Against Trafficking (SECAT) program for a September 29-October 1 workshop in Skopje, Macedonia, where they shared lessons learned during their anti-trafficking projects and discussed strategies for ongoing collaboration in the anti-trafficking community. Through the SECAT program, NGO leaders teamed up with community stakeholders, including local and state government officials, prosecutors, police officials, and lawyers, to increase cross-sectoral collaboration and implement community mobilization projects in their communities.
Eighteen participants from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia shared the progress of their SECAT activities with the group, outlining successes and challenges and inviting questions and comments on their projects. Despite the diversity of project design, participants found they shared some of the same strategies and challenges, and many reported that their projects succeeded in bringing stakeholders on the issue of trafficking together for discussion for the first time. In Albania, for example, NGO Vatra worked together with a local police official to hold a workshop for local media, government officials, and NGOs to share their expertise on anti-trafficking issues and to unite the stakeholders in a network. The Albanian team also produced informational brochures and a segment on local television informing viewers of the anti-trafficking network, the services it offers, and ways for viewers to get involved.
In Kosovo, SECAT participants developed a different kind of community activity targeted at civic education teachers. Since information about trafficking in human beings has recently been added to the required eighth and ninth grade curriculum by Kosovo’s Ministry of Education, civic education teachers are in need of training and education on the issue. Kosovo’s SECAT participants successfully bridged the gap between government and community groups for this project, collaborating with government ministries and local and international NGOs to design and implement their training.
Network maintenance, building official and unofficial coalitions, strategies for securing funding, and next steps for SECAT cooperation were the main focus areas of the workshop training, conducted by Partners for Democratic Change. SECAT participants requested training in these areas, recognizing the importance of maintaining and building upon the projects they developed during the program. Special attention was paid to the different aspects of maintaining an active, effective coalition, including ideas for decision making and motivating participants. Advocacy was also introduced as a vital tool for participants in their ongoing anti-trafficking activities. The goals of advocacy were discussed, and participants worked with the trainers to come up with an outline of the steps that should be taken when preparing to advocate for an issue.
Participants were also eager to build on and formalize the informal network of anti-trafficking organizations and institutions begun under SECAT. All participants expressed a strong interest in continuing and strengthening this network, and pledged to work to outline next steps for their ongoing collaboration.
