CoM – East III Inception mission took place in Azerbaijan

From April 11 to April 14, 2022 the Inception mission with the participation of Mr. Christophe Frering - Team Leader, Ms. Iryna Horodyska - Capacity Building and Helpdesk Coordinator, Mr. Jan Wanders - Policy and Institutional Relations Coordinator, Mr. Ivan Shchadranok – Regional Coordination Expert and Trainer and Mr. Jahangir Afandiyev - Country Expert for Azerbaijan held meetings with main stakeholders of the CoM initiative in Azerbaijan.

The overall objective of these kick-off visits was to ensure a smooth start of the CoM - East III project implementation, in particular, by checking that the work programme proposed in the technical offer meets the needs of beneficiaries and that the assumptions were correct.

The Inception mission held meetings with the Ministry of Energy (the Covenant of Mayors National Coordinator) and the EU Delegation to Azerbaijan. At the meeting with the Ministry of Energy, it was determined that the bottleneck in the further progress of the CoM - East initiative in Azerbaijan is an extremely poor capacity of municipalities in SECAPs development. The Ministry of Energy requested technical assistance from the project in the SECAPs preparation for new six signatories. The project proposed an approach based on continuous step-by-step support for each stage of SECAP development, starting from elaborating the country’s specific templates and methodological support in collecting data for the Baseline emission inventory calculation to finalizing and submitting to JRC and its further consulting support in communication with JRC, until the programme is approved. During the inception visits, the main stakeholders, as well as the EU and international programmes, were identified, contacts and cooperation with which will be further developed after the inception phase. 

Useful contacts have been established with the EBRD Baku office in order to start cooperation on getting Mingachevir on board of the EBRD’s Green Cities programme and on joint development of a project proposal for so-called “trigger project” to be financed by the EBRD. Further collaboration will be sought with the EU4Climate programme (among others) with regards to cooperation between national and local level stakeholders for climate adaptation, as well as with Mayors for Economic Growth (M4EG) for local energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.