MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th August, 2020) Russia's state agency Rossotrudnichestvo plans to expand its activities beyond the promotion of cultural cooperation and concentrate on international development assistance, Yevgeny Primakov, a new head of the agency, told Sputnik in an interview.
Upon its establishment in 2008, Rossotrudnichestvo was initially assigned to carry out Russia's international development assistance activities, such as allocation of financial and humanitarian aid to the countries in need. However, those functions largely remained with Russia's Finance Ministry, while a department for international development assistance within Rossotrudnichestvo has been dissolved.
"Now we do work in the field of international development of assistance, it inscribed in the name of one of the departments. According to the scheme that we will defend [in the Government], we will have a department for humanitarian programs and international development assistance, a separate department where all the humanitarian aid and international development assistance will be concentrated," Primakov said.
Rossotrudnichestvo has already ventured into the field of international development assistance by helping to send a team of doctors from Russia's Emergency Children's Surgery and Traumatology Research Institute to Beirut, the official noted.
As part of Rossotrudnichestvo's overhaul, the agency also plans to introduce a system of key performance indicators to evaluate its activities and is already in contact with the academic community on that, according to Primakov.
"We will develop our KPI criteria, which should be logical and explainable, clear to the Ministry of Finance, approved by the Ministry of Finance. This is a complex story, there is not always a conviction that it is possible to calculate some kind of logarithmic form, and there will probably be different criteria for different areas of our activity," the head of Rossotrudnichestvo said.
Primakov was appointed as the head of Rossotrudnichestvo in June. Prior to that, he was a member of the Russian lower house's international affairs committee. Upon his appointment, Primakov told Sputnik that Rossotrudnichestvo would soon experience "great changes."
