Voice for Tropoja 2.0 : Rural Sustainable Development

This project aims to support the community of Tropoja in practical steps for developing our region in an environmentally, socially & economically sustainable way, as well as to further replicate the model to other communities in the region through 3 objectives:  1) Empowering locals to realize their business potential and therefore improving economic opportunities from a sustainable business model.  This will be achieved by training a core group of locals to serve as peer-coaches over an extended period to aid other community members to start new businesses or improve existing ones, as well as by supporting promotion of Tropoja’s businesses.  2) Influencing policies on environmentally sustainable development.  Local people will be trained to plan a strategic advocacy plan to influence policy makers from local to international governance levels to support community-driven sustainable development policies.  3) Strengthening regional cooperation and creating networks among communities and CSOs from Western Balkan and Visegrad countries. The project started in February 2020 and will run until July 2021.  The first planned activities were the trainings for sustainable business practices, based around plans to bring experts from our Visegrad partners to Tropoja to deliver workshops.  The Covid Quarantine prevented this but, believing in the importance of the goals of the project, we all re-organized to present the trainings instead in the form of short videos hosted online (here), supported by at least one online “zoom” meeting and an ongoing online discussion forum.  In short – we made it even better!