In accordance to the Programme objectives, the goals of these projects are to ensure sustainable and equitable socio-economic development in the regions involved in the project, helping to make them more competitive and attractive for living, working and visiting.

Applications were created with the aim to raise funds for the implementation of the projects. These projects accentuate the main objectives of the Latvian, Lithuanian and European development strategies:

• Environmental resource management and the education that is related to it;
• Work based STEM education and its development.

In order to ensure quality in both cooperation project applications, following activities were carried out:

• The analysis of European, Baltic and Latvian environmental and education policy planning documents in order to find out how their goals are interlinked with the Programme objectives;
• Communication and cooperation with the consortium partners - participating organizations, representing both private and public sector, in order to define their expectations towards this project;
• Collection and analysis of the information related to the previous practices, incentives and approaches used in the past projects of environmental resource management and STEM education.

The information that was obtained through the project application activities made it possible to substantiate the main project activities, basing on the Latvian, Lithuanian and European strategic objectives in these areas. The main activities planned within these projects are as follows:

• Generation Z for the Environment:

-   The establishment of an information flow and a cooperation network for the education institutions, organizations and the public in order to ensure freely accessible information exchange about environmental resource management;

-   Development and implementation of pro-active and sustainable education programmes, in order to raise awareness regarding environmental resource management and its aspects;

-   Designing and implementing two informative and educational campaigns for the general public;

-   Improve capacities of the involved actors.

• Improving STEM education:

-   Development of synergy based cooperation network for public educational institutions and organisations;

-   Development and implementation of sustainable educational programmes for teachers and pupils utilising non-traditional and pro-active methods of teaching and learning STEM;

-   Designing and implementing innovative cooperation model- transregional tool/ method for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the public services, namely, educational programmes and of the results of activities tackling gender balance in STEM;

-   Improve capacities of the involved actors.

New insights to the project area, as well as additional experience and new competencies in planning and implementing Latvia – Lithuania cooperation projects were gained during the project application development, including the necessary planning of the  projects whose value is over a half of a million euros.