News

The fourteenth regular meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the Operational Programme "Human Resources Development" was held on May 14 in the town of Sandanski.It was led by the Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy Iveta Iankova. The meeting was attended by  Aurelio Cecilia, head of the "Bulgaria, Romania and Malta" DG "Employment" of the European Commission, the Deputy Minister of Education Ivan Krastev, representatives of the European Commission, also of main institutions involved in the implementation of the OP HRD and NGOs . Roma organizations were represented by Deyan Kolev.

 The members of the Monitoring Committee discussed and approved the report on the current implementation of the operational program for 2013. There was a significant progress of the program in the last year as far as the end of December 2013 98%  of the total budget of the program are agreed and 1442 million are paid out (nearly 61% of the program budget).Verified and reported to the European Commission, 54% of the total program budget or over 1275 million

The annual report highlights the results achieved.  In 2013 over 23,000 people have started working after providing intermediary services or successfully completed training. Nearly 5400 people have begun work in the social economy. The total number of people found a new job thanks to the OP approached 105,000 people since the start of the program. OP has made possible the almost 184 000 children to participate in extracurricular activities, and thus the total number of children involved in such training forms reached the impressive number of 782,000 since the start of the program to date. In the sphere of social inclusion, over 13,000 people every month received "personal assistant" service and the total number of people having access to services in the community or in the family have grown to 5000 people for the period from January to December of last year. From the start of the program until now the number of people with improved access to services in the community or at home grew by over 65 thousand people.

The Annual Report has some conceptual errors in the part of Roma integration, commented Deyan Kolev. For example, it is stated that more than 11 000 students were desegregated and this number includes all students involved in projects for educational integration. Very few of them have moved from separate ethnically mixed schools, so the actual number of "desegregated" is significantly smaller, said Kolev  and asked to be clarified.  He emphasized the failure of indicators to Chapter 6, "Fields of action for the Roma community," and stressed that only educational indicators to some extent are fulfilled – thanks to the announced "targeted" schemes, while in other areas the performance is significantly slower. Kolev appealed to this new HRD OP and OP "Science and Education" to announce targeted (i.e. targeting Roma) schemes immediately after their approval to move forward in the implementation of the National Strategy for Integration of Roma.

The members of the Monitoring Committee approved amendments to some existing schemes for the purpose of performance indicators and utilization of financial resources saved. Тhere are additional 20 million for the service called "personal assistant", which created the possibility of providing the service to continue until the end of 2014. The period of project implementation support to schools was extended as well as project ‘SUCCESS’ by which extracurricular activities are organized. In this regard, Deyan Kolev note that the financial resources for the projects is hardly enough for the whole school year (2014/15) implying the need to target resources on the new OP "Science and education smart growth" or from the state budget so that in any case to avoid a "hole" in funding for the second semester of the year. Additional resources for the new literacy courses for adults were set aside as well.

At the meeting, the Committee approved the operation "Youth Employment", which will be funded by the new OPHRD. The program total amount is 35 million and will be implemented by the end of 2016. Thanks to that, nearly 8000 young unemployed people (under the age of 29) will be able to participate in short-term 6-month internships or job training with an employer for up to 6 months. For employers, it would be a form of subsidized employment that will assist them in hard business times. Deyan Kolev made ​​constructive criticism that the criterion for selecting the program in any form does not encourage hiring of young Roma. It’s very likely that the percentage of Roma employees hired by this program wil be  negligible, said Kolev giving the example with the previous program "Support for Employment", in which under half a percent of the employees were Roma. He recommended additions agreements to encourage hiring of young people from minorities with secondary and higher education that will make them a role model for others.