Starting from December 2004, the Albanian Development Fund with the assistance of a local consultant, Urban Research Institute (URI) launched the completion of a broad sub-project participatory identification process all over Albania.
The project involved all 374 local government units of the country in a process which combined an intensive awareness campaign and capacity building with fieldwork activities aiming at ensuring a broad participation of citizens in identifying their basic infrastructure priority needs; establishment of citizen participation structures by combining membership of citizen and local officials’ towards structures of solely citizen composition; and production of pre feasibility studies for village top selected priorities. At the end of the eight months intensive work, the following results have come up:

• Invitation for the participation in the process was addressed to 372 Local

Government units;

• An intensive media campaign was launched for 30 consecutive days to

announce and increase awareness of citizens for enhanced participation;

• A publication was prepared and issued in 700 copies containing

instructions combined with case study on the participatory sub-project
identification process;

• 24 workshops were organized and conducted countrywide;
• 663 local officials and members of commune/municipality CMGs were

trained on principles and process of conducting participatory subproject
identification;

• Almost 300 visits were conducted from URI representatives within the

first phase of the project;

• 333 LGUs or 89.5% of LGU-s in Albania committed and conducted the

sub-project participatory identification process. They took over the
responsibility and led up the process for the organization of the decision making
process in respect with identification of needs and priorities in
their own communities.

• 2386 out of 2960 or 80 % of the total number of villages in Albania and

164 neighborhoods in 60 cities organized 4042 open community meetings
with a moderated participation of women, by substantially increasing
the role of the community in decision making of priority identification
process.

• The process involves participation of 319,488 citizens all over the country;

out of which 65,768 or almost 21% were women and around 85,073 or 27%
were young people

• 371 Local Government Consulting and Monitoring Groups (CMG) with a

mixed membership from local community and officials have been created
in Albania with the scope of coordinating, leading of the participatory
subproject identification and follow up with project implementation.

• 2521 CMG-s with pure citizen membership have been created in the

villages and neighborhoods, thus contributing with increasing
accountability of local officials and ensuring sustainable participation of
all actors involved in the sub-projects identification stages.

• Around 7,500 sub-projects are identified, out of which 24351 are developed

by the village and commune CMG-s up at the stage of technical prefeasibilities
while 2357 of them are supported even with environmental
pre-feasibility studies.

• 2201 villages/neighborhoods or 75% of the total number of villages have

selected one top priority subprojects accompanied with a proper technical
pre-feasibilities study: The following is the break down according to the
type of projects:
1. construction/rehabilitation of roads 1152 or 52 % of the total
2. construction of water systems 349 or 16% of the total
3. construction of sewer systems 148 or 7.5% of the total
4. construction/rehabilitation of schools 138 or 6.5 % of the total
5. others 414 or 18% of the total