The Platform of Civil Society Organizations for Fight Against Corruption, whose member is the Center for Civil Communications, published the first Anti-Corruption Monthly for November 2022 as an informant about the activities of the members of the Platform in the past month. The platform is an active network of civil society organizations that promotes good governance, leads initiatives and takes advocacy steps in the direction of encouraging citizens and encourages political will to fight corruption in the Republic of North Macedonia.

Skopje, 19.10.2022 Representatives of civil society organizations in the field of environmental protection and the fight against corruption exchanged ideas and knowledge for detecting the risks of corruption in public procurement related to environmental protection, as well as for a more complete coverage of the situation with sustainable public procurement in the country.

At the workshop, the initial findings from the monitoring of the Center for Civil Communications of the implemented "green procurement" in the country were presented, as well as the research of procurements that could, but did not have elements of environmental protection. The results of the monitoring and research will be presented at the end of the year, together with recommendations for the promotion of "green procurement" and for protection against corruption in this area.

These activities are carried out within the project "Adapting to climate change through the prevention of corruption in public procurement" implemented by the Center for Civil Communications and the Platform of Civil Society Organizations to Fight Corruption, and is financially supported by the Foundation Open Society - Macedonia.

More than 170 representatives of municipalities and local public enterprises from Bitola, Kichevo, Kumanovo, Negotino, Strumica, Tetovo, Chair and Shtip participated in a series of 8 trainings held from May to October this year, which should help the municipal administration and of employees in local public enterprises to introduce an integrity system, to increase transparency, as well as assess the risks of corruption in public procurement and reduce them. The trainings are part of the "Safeguards against corruption" project, which is implemented with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The research conducted in June 2022 shows that, in 2022, the 30 biggest state-owned enterprises have published only 48% of information and documents they are obliged to share/upload on their official websites. Hence, it could be concluded that SOEs demonstrated a minimum increase of only 7 percentile points in terms of transparency and accountability over the period of two years. For comparison, in 2020 the same group of enterprises had published 41% of relevant information and documents, while in 2018 their compliance level stood at only 28%. This resulted in increased transparency of SOEs by 7 percentile points over the analysed period, but is still within the category of limited transparency.