Implementing Partners

 

FIRMA will work primarily through local implementing partners to implement a wide range of activities required to s–upport the growth of the tourism, wood-processing and light-manufacturing value chains. FIRMA will only be able to acheive its targeted results through the cooperation of a large number of stakeholders. There are three main groups of FIRMA partners: Value Chain Facilitators Activity Implementers and Collaborative Implementers,

On March 3rd and 4th, 2010, in Hotel Sarajevo (Sarajevo) FIRMA held a workshop for its Value Chain Facilitators (VCFs).
The purpose of the workshop was to introduce the VCFs to the cross-cutting FIRMA components and the baseline survey results in order to help them design future value chain activities.

During the first day of the workshop, FIRMA presented recommended activities to address value chain constraints in the cross cutting areas of workforce development, EU alignment, gender issues, and access to finance. The results of the baseline survey were also presented which included over 500 companies from all nine FIRMA supported value chains. The second day of the workshop was mainly dedicated to providing information about FIRMA Small grants fund.

The workshop in Hotel Sarajevo was attended by all of the VCFs from all three FIRMA focus sectors; wood, light manufacturing and tourism.

Value Chain Facilitators

Value Chain Facilitators are organizations that bring together a network of stakeholders within a product value chain. The main role of the Value Chain Facilitators is identification, selection, organization and funding of interventions that the stakeholder network members identified as priorities in the process of raising competitiveness of a specific product.

The role of a VCF is to lead the identification, selection, organization, and financing of prioritized interventions to address obstacles to the competitiveness of a one or more of the value chains that are within the FIRMA focus sectors.

This role involves such tasks as organizing the networking of firms and other stakeholders within a value chain, arranging collaborative meetings among stakeholders to identify priority concerns, organizing joint activities to address constraints to the competitiveness of value chains, and seeking funds from a variety of sources to finance these activities.

 

VCF Name	Sector	Region
Bascarsija ZUP	Tourism	Sarajevo
BiH MET NET	Light Manufacturing
Chamber of Commerce Republika Srpska	Light Manufacturing Wood Processing	Republika Srpska
Green Tour	Tourism	Vrbas & Pliva river valleys
NERDA	Wood Processing	North-East BiH
PLOD & Una Sana Chamber of Commerce	Wood Processing	Una-Sana Canton
REDAH	Tourism	Herzegovina
REZ	Light Manufacturing	Central Bosnia
Sarajevo Navigator	Tourism	Sarajevo
REZ & BH Wood Cluster	Wood Processing	Central Bosnia
SERDA	Wood Processing Light Manufacturing	Sarajevo and surrounding areas

 

Activity Implementers

Activity Implementers (AI) are organizations that implement specific activities that address a constraint in a FIRMA targeted value chain. AIs can be institutions, companies, research organizations, training and educational institutions and business development services. AIs will be most often be engaged through the FIRMA grants fund. Examples of activities that may be implemented by AIs include financial management coaching, tourist guide training, support to implement CE Marking.

Collaborative Implementers

FIRMA is aware that there are numerous national and international organizations that have been working on raising competitiveness in wood processing, tourism, and light manufacturing sectors for a number of years. For the purpose of improving coordination of activities and rational allocation of the funds available for these three sectors, FIRMA will cooperate with all organizations that are willing to work together to achieve both their individual objectives and the common objectives related to further development of these three sectors.