WBAA Board meeting in Skopje - 18 & 19 September 2021

Last weekend, on 18 and 19 September 2021, we had our first Board meeting as a face-to-face event after a long time. Unfortunately, only 6 of the 12 Board members were able to travel to Skopje. However, some could join the Board virtually, making it a hybrid event. It was very nice to finally see each other in real life again and our exchange was very productive. After the work within WBAA was limited for some time by the virtual meetings, there was much to discuss.

A big topic were the upcoming elections for 7 new Board members, how the election will be conducted and how a good handover can take place. Interested WBAA members can apply until 29 September for the position of a Board member for Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, the elections in the 5 chapters will take place in mid-October. The handover from the old to the new Board will then take place until the next Board meeting at the end of November. Also, we have already started planning the next General Assembly, which will take place in Pristina early next year.

The second big issue is the new WBAA teams. A total of 46 members have registered for the 5 new teams and there will be a kick-off meeting at the beginning of October, which will be accompanied by the Board. We also talked about how we can further disseminate the Tracer Study, as we still need to improve the number of feedback on the study from the WBAA network.

Moreover, we discussed the launch of the new WBAA online community, which will go live on 04 October. Be excited, the new community will offer us many new possibilities and hopefully facilitate the exchange within the network.

Another important topic are the WBAA Projects and we were pleased that the two project coordinators Kiril Jordanov and Pane Stefanov from North Macedonia joined us for the topic and reported on the successful implementation of their projects. We also talked a lot about how we can work together constructively to achieve the best for WBAA.

Parts of the event were virtually attended by a representative of the European Commission and for dinner on Saturday, 18 September, we received guests from the National Agency for European Educational Programmes and Mobility (NAEEPM), Europe House Skopje and the Ministry of Education and Science.

After the Corona pandemic had slowed down the activities in the network, we finally have a lot of activities coming up this autumn and we are looking forward to it!

Germany, Cologne

23 September 2021