Sofia, August 4 2015
The Bulgarian Centre for Not-for-Profit Law presented at the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA) the NGO Sustainability Index for Bulgaria for 2014. Part of the event was Rumyana Bachvarova – vice-prime minister and minister of the interior. Bulgaria has a 3.3 quotient and falls into the “developing sustainability” category and is at the 8th position regionally. The “champion” of 2014 is Estonia, which together with 5 other countries – Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania is under the “stable sustainability” category. The NGO community is at a decline in the categories legal environment, advocacy and social prestige and on the rise in the categories organizational capacity, infrastructure and financial stability, as the progress of the last indicator is mainly due to external financing programmes like the Norwegian financial mechanism and the Swiss programme.
Very symptomatic for the level of social prestige of the NGOs was the fact that most of the representatives of the media with which the hall was literally packed, left with minister Bachvarova, since the most interesting part of the event happened afterwards – a discussion about the new NGO bill and also an open dialogue about the important things that the civil society knows and is not afraid to say out loud.
