Ministry of Youth and Sport does not have enough employees responsible for youth area, NGO
“Even if it’s called the Ministry of Youth and Sport, at institutional level the Ministry does not have enough employees who would deal with youth-related problems. There are four persons only who work in this field. The others deal with the sport area,” said the chairman of the National Youth Council Eduard Mihalas.
According to him, during 2005-2008 the World Bank, UNICEF and other foreign donors provided financing for projects intended for youth. Now the Ministry does not have donors that would support this field. “Civil society recommends the Ministry to increase its personnel and institutional capacity. For example, the National Children’s and Youth Center “Artico” has 15 employees responsible for the youth sector, while the Ministry has only 4. There should be created an agency that would deal with programs and grants, while the Ministry should focus only on polices,” said Mihalas, quoted by Info-Prim Neo.
“The Ministry aims to adopt by four policy projects every year. In 2012 it adopted only one project for youth, namely the mechanism for implementing the Law on Volunteering, but it did it with delay,” stated Eduard Mihalas.
However, he said he was satisfied with the cooperation between the youth organizations and the Ministry. The Ministry supports the youth organizations in different activities, while when drafting bills on the youth it consults the young people who represent civil society.
As regards the Ministry’s statistics, they are somehow different from those of civil society. According to the data of the National Youth Council, the number of unemployed young people is much higher than the figures presented by the Government. On April 1, 2012, the jobless rate was 12.3%. The employment rate among young people was 27.4% on April 1, 2011 according to the Ministry, while the National Bureau of Statistics reported a rate of 10.2.