Belgium – Training seminars – Capacity building of consumer organizations to empower consumer protection professionals

The general objective of this call for tenders is to develop an effective approach to capacity building of consumer organizations and provide trainings to participating countries' consumer organizations and other stakeholders active in consumer policy at Union, national, regional and local level. Consumer organizations play a pivotal role in representing consumer needs, protecting their rights, in offering advice, support and education, and in shaping the policy agenda around the Union. Improving consumer policy development calls for intensive and skilled input from end-users and consumers (for example in task forces, advisory groups) thus, consumer representatives are expected to have specific and targeted knowledge. This in turn calls for focused and specialist training of those representing the interests of European consumers. Following the good uptake of the training and a high level of satisfaction expressed by the participants of the Consumer PRO 2019-2023 project, the European Commission decided to continue a similar capacity building of consumer organization project by publishing a new call. The aim of the new project will be to ensure some continuation of the previous Consumer PRO while taking advantage of its outcomes and lessons learned.