In 2024 the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, SIDA, announced a halt in support for Swedish civil society organizations through strategic partner programs. This decision send shock waves through the European civil society, especially in the Nordic countries, and caused concern and fear that the rest of the Nordic governments would follow the same path, as the same trend has been spotted across other European countries.

In response to this development, ForUM (Norway), Concord (Sweden), Global Focus (Denmark) and Fingo (Finland) invite the Nordic civil society to a webinar on development cooperation, ODA and trends within the sector in the nordic countries and the rest of Europe. The purpose of the webinar is to gear civil society for a new political context for ODA and to strengthen alliances across countries.

At the webinar, the national platform for each country will present the current national political context and development on ODA. The presentations will touch upon:

• trends in ODA levels – including climate financing
• the role and funding of civil society in a new political context
• how civil society can adapt their advocacy work to new political contexts in the Nordics

After the presentations, there will be time for a questions and a plenary discussion. We invite all civil society in the Nordic countries to participate in the webinar in order to make the discussion as nuanced and represenative for the concerns and challenges the civil society face across countries.

The seminar will be held in English and a zoom link will be shared a few days in advance of the webinar.