The CORA partners applied for a project extension for additional 18 months. The Steering Committee of the Interreg North Sea Region Programme approved the extension and the CORA will run till 31 December 2022.
CORA project partners welcome the Programme’s decision of extending the project. This extension will allow partners and stakeholders to enlarge the CORA community and enhance the awareness and abilities of local and regional authorities beyond the CORA partnership with the aim of increasing resilience and future proof rural areas through digitalisation.
Within the CORA project, over the past three years, a unique yet simple model has been developed and implemented to support digitization in the most rural areas with the aim to close the digital gap between remote and urbanized areas. The model is built on three pillars, digital services, digital skills and digital infrastructure, three key components in which the digital divide is reflected. By thinking about these three components, local governments obtain a better understanding of the challenges their region is facing. Through nine regional pilots and by applying various developed e-learnings and trainings, the CORA project has provided the necessary support and guiding measures in the partner regions to achieve more digitization in the rural regions.
We build further on the existing pillars and validated CORA tools, to apply them in partner’s neighbouring municipalities to also make them think about their digital infrastructure, services and skills. As the landscape of municipalities and their digital readiness is quite heterogenic, we will carry out a basis analysis to understand the readiness and maturity of these regions and define together their priorities. But it doesn’t stop there. In CORA all participating partners have been using the training courses and modules. By applying the CORA model, the hands-on support provided by the CORA partners and the implementation of the developed e-training courses, we want to work with each municipality or region to understand their needs, think deep and create their own ‘digital agenda’ for the future or set up new thematic action plans and initiatives.
