Western Balkans Regional Youth Lab, a three-year project implemented by the Regional Cooperation Council, provides an opportunity for young people to participate in a decision-making process in the field of youth unemployment.
Taking into account that Belgrade Open School has been dealing with issues in the fields of Improvement of employability and Youth policy for many years, the representative of BOS, Jovana Bozickovic, became a member of the first Regional Thematic Youth Lab on Youth Unemployment.
Through the activities of Improvement of employability programme area, BOS is helping individuals to creatively respond to the challenges during the processes of searching, getting and keeping a job, as well as professional and private progress. The programme area Improvement of employability consists of the two complementary thematic areas: Career guidance and counseling and Education and the Labour market. Through the programme area related to youth policy, BOS strives to ensure the participation of young people in all aspects of social and political life, as well as improving their living conditions.
The Regional Thematic Youth Lab on Youth Unemployment, which results will be recommendations in the field of policies for solving the issue of youth unemployment, started working in December 2020. The project covers six economies of the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Montenegro, Serbia and Northern Macedonia, in which young people make up 21.27 % of the general population. More than 40 young people, experts and decision-makers from the Western Balkans identified three most crucial topics in the field of employability, such as entrepreneurship, work internships and quality employment.
The team of young people, experts and decision makers representing Serbia consists of representatives of the Ministry of Youth and Sports (Aleksandar Vostic and Snezana Klasnja), the Ministry of Labor, Veterans and Social Affairs (Bosko Latkovic) and youth representatives - Mina Dobrijevic (National Youth Council of Serbia), Marko Stankovic (Junior Achievement Serbia), Milena Reljic (Opre Roma) and Jovana Bozickovic (Belgrade Open School).
Western Balkans Regional Youth Lab Project enables a long-term, structured, regional dialogue between youth organizations and national administrations. The project is aiming to support these institutions to jointly make policies concerning youth participation in decision-making processes in order to improve the overall socio-economic environment and youth mobility within Western Balkans.
You can follow the further work of the Regional Thematic Youth Lab on Youth Unemployment HERE.