Business summit in Warsaw

The Central European Initiative Summit Economic Forum (CEI SEF) is coming to Warsaw this month because Poland holds the rotating CEI presidency for 2003. The event, featuring the participation of 17 heads of state from across the region, also aims to create networking opportunities for businesspeople.

"We aim to provide opportunities for business-to-business, face-to-face encounters," says Vincenzo Calogero, the head of the projects secretariat at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which is responsible for organizing the event. Participants will have the opportunity to meet entrepreneurs from other countries, who operate in similar sectors and discuss opportunities for co-operation.

Since the event was launched six years ago, the SEF format has evolved to accommodate greater opportunities for such networking. This year's event will, for the first time, allow participants to come to the summit with an idea of who they might want to talk to, as the details of participating businesses have been made available on the CEI web site.

Calogero admits, however, that CEI SEF has not yet made any attempt to monitor how successful it is in its function of match-maker.

"We should perhaps do it a little more and we are working on it," he says. "We are happy when we can get (business) people to talk. That in itself is a success."

CEI, whose membership includes countries as diverse as Italy, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Belarus, was set up by four countries in 1989, while Poland joined two years later. Its economic activities consists primarily of facilitating cross-border co-operation. The domestic authorities' failure to sufficiently promote the Warsaw event is not helping, complain sources close to the event's organizers. It remains to be seen whether the lack of a proper public relations policy on the part of the government will once again become a stumbling block for this country's business.