30/10/2025 On 29 October 2025, the kick-off event of the new project “Pathways to Partnership: Strengthening Local Cooperation for Ukraine’s Recovery and EU Integration” brought together 80 participants in an online meeting marking the official start of the project’s 18-month implementation period. The initiative connects host municipalities from EU Member States and candidate countries with beneficiary municipalities from Ukraine, fostering cooperation for recovery, reform, and EU integration.
Participants included representatives of local governments from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova, Montenegro, and Ukraine, as well as NALAS member associations and project staff.
Building on earlier pilot actions as a foundation for broader networking, the project seeks to leverage best practices and peer learning to help Ukrainian municipalities address the most urgent, real-life challenges faced by their citizens, particularly where the impact of destruction is most severe: at the local level.
In their opening remarks, directors Andrej Horvath (U-LEAD) and Kelmend Zajazi (NALAS) highlighted the principle of solidarity as both an institutional commitment and a driving force uniting U-LEAD and NALAS in this third joint initiative dedicated to fostering partnerships and local cooperation.
The Pathways to Partnership project focuses primarily on Ukrainian municipalities that have not yet established partnerships with European counterparts. Its goal is to expand peer-to-peer exchange, share best practices, and develop concrete joint activities that strengthen local capacities for reconstruction, recovery, and reform. Since the outset of its collaboration with U-LEAD, NALAS has expressed its readiness to support post-conflict recovery, drawing on its extensive experience assisting local governments in South-East Europe in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars.
To establish a shared understanding of the project’s objectives, activities, and implementation framework, NALAS and U-LEAD coordinators presented ‘Pathways to Partnership’ as part of Phase III of U-LEAD with Europe, a programme dedicated to enhancing local governance and development by empowering Ukrainian municipalities through regional cooperation and knowledge exchange.
During the event, participants, forming newly established “tandems” of host and beneficiary municipalities, were briefed on the identification phase that began in August 2025, which culminated in a matchmaking process linking hosts from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Moldova, and Romania with their Ukrainian partners. In total, 20 host municipalities, 12 from EU Member States and 8 from candidate countries, confirmed their commitment to developing sustainable partnerships with Ukrainian counterparts.
The tandems, meeting for the first time during the kick-off event, expressed strong interest in learning more about the project’s diverse implementation framework. Key components of the programme include a Shadowing Programme, a five-day peer exchange hosted by the partner municipality, EU fundraising training, mentoring sessions, coaching clinics, a networking event bringing together local leaders from the EU, candidate countries, and Ukraine as well as participation in key international events, including the Bridges of Trust Gathering (BoT) and the European Week of Regions and Cities in 2025 and 2026.
Following the kick-off, individual online tandem meetings will be held to enable host and beneficiary municipalities to lay the groundwork for cooperation and jointly identify priority topics. These themes will then be further developed through a series of online and in-person exchanges throughout the project’s duration.
