North Macedonia closer to the liberalisation of its postal market

The twinning project Strengthening the capacity of the North Macedonian postal agency, which has run for 18 months, has ended successfully after helping to bring the country closer to liberalising its postal market. The main objective of this project has been to improve the quality of postal services and to provide training for employees of the North Macedonian Postal Agency.

The twinning project (Twinning) had been running since the end of 2018, with a total budget of €600,000, funded by the European Commission. It was led by the General Sub-Directorate of the Postal System, part of the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, and was supported by the staff of the Post Office, an institution to which the expatriate personnel in the field also belong. All this with the management of FIIAPP to carry out the established objectives.

The pandemic has affected the lives of people all over the world and, of course, cooperation has been no exception. Creativity and commitment have been key to professionally overcome the obstacles for the implementation of the project. The methodologies have been redesigned to continue sharing good practices to achieve the proposed results, while maintaining quality. COVID19 has coincided with the final phase of the project, which is why the specialists have turned to conducting the training remotely, respecting the times and rhythms of the North Macedonian Postal Agency.

The basic aim of the last activity was to assess the capabilities of the staff of the Postal Agency, the Ministry of Transport and Communications and the North Macedonian Post Office in analytical accounting and to continue with the training programme to compensate for the identified needs.

Microsoft Teams was used for this, as well as tools such as VoIP, text and video chat, and editing in real time. An accounting model was created in Excel, with the beneficiary institution able to see it being created in real time and interact with the specialists. Simultaneous interpretation was also provided for.

The project has come to an end and the sister institution now has policy manuals, accounting models, recommendations for inspection and an operational manual for the implementation of private mailboxes, among other things.

North Macedonia now has the administrative and regulatory capacity to make proposals to amend its laws and regulations in order to apply the acquis of the European Union. A working group with representatives from both the agency and the Ministry will work on amendments to the Postal Services Act in 2020.

In line with the recommendations of the European Union, the project calling for full deregulation of the postal market and the Macedonian Ministry of Transport and Communications is expected to prepare and adopt a new strategy to develop the postal sector.