Success Story: Internal Study Tours, an Effort to Encourage Municipalities to Share Best Practices and Learn from Albanian Successes.
USAID's new four-year $7.3 million Local Governance Program in Albania (LGPA) aims to improve governance in select municipalities and build public-private partnerships to create a “business friendly” environment in which the local private sector can flourish. USAID activities will seek to increase investment, create jobs, raise incomes, and ultimately, expand municipalities’ tax base revenues.
An internal Study Tour organized by the Municipality of Kukes to that of Vore, brought together tax office representatives from both municipalities resulting in a revenue plan increase for the
Kukes Municipality for the second half of 2009.

In an effort to encourage municipalities to share best practices and learn from Albanian successes, in December 2008, LGPA launched an in-country study tour program. LGPA target municipalities were invited to submit incountry study tour requests on issues related to the LGPA program such as tax collection and audit, asset management, urban planning, municipal borrowing, etc. In this framework, the Kukes Municipality expressed its interest to visit the small Municipality of Vore near Tirana to get experience regarding the way and methodology followed by this municipality in the collection of local revenues.