(27 September 2019) – As part of AEIDL’s 30th anniversary celebrations, 12 AEIDL staff members, freelancers and associate members went to Moldova to see for themselves how the implementation of the LEADER approach is helping reinvent rural areas in the poorest country in Europe.
As UNDP expert, the President of AEIDL, Márta Márczis, who lead the visit, supported the implementation of the LEADER/ community-led local development (CLLD) approach in the Republic of Moldova from 2016 to 2018 through the Support to Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) project , an EU initiative implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
It took about a year for the SARD team to establish eight pilot Local Action Groups (LAGs) bringing together local authorities, civil society and economic agents of neighbouring villages to work in partnership towards the development of their localities.
There are now 32 LAGs covering 30 percent of Moldova’s rural territory. To ensure the sustainability of the programme, a national LEADER Network was established in December 2018 to take over from the SARD project which ended at the same time.