Twinning Officers Meet in Nicosia – 31/05/2010

Most Cypriot Municipalities have a website, from which citizens or other municipalities can take all the necessary information on issues that concern or interest them.

What happens, though, when a foreign municipality is looking for a municipality in Cyprus in order to be twinned with or create a partnership for another project?

Up to now there are 2 options: Exclusively for twinnings, the solution can be provided by the website of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions http://www.twinning.org/. Cypriot Municipalities can upload their profile and partner search, in order for other municipalities in Europe and the world to be able to contact them. The twinning.org website is, however, addressed to all municipalities in Europe, which means that information relating to the municipalities of Cyprus can be ‘lost’ in the abundance of information.

For both Twinnings, and other European projects, there is also the possibility, for any municipality in Europe to contact the Union of Cyprus Municipalities, which will then transmit that information to all of its member municipalities, hoping that one of them will respond positively to the request.

As one can see, what was missing until now was a website that would focus exclusively on the municipalities of Cyprus and present their characteristics in an identical, coherent and understandable manner, so that anyone could quickly select among 33 municipalities in Cyprus, those who interest them the most in order to create a partnership or twinning link.

The possibility to create this website was given to the Union of Cyprus Municipalities through the Europe for Citizens Programme. This website, has now been created, is available online at: https://ucm.org.cy/Account_List.aspx and is being enriched with more information every day.