Македонски центар за меѓународна соработка - МЦМС

With paraphrase of the Polio Plus message “Nothing for us, without us”, Petrus Theunisz, international Civica Mobilitas team leader, opened the regional forum in the East and Southeast region, which took place under the motto “Everybody involved, involvement for everybody!“ in the Multimedia Center Kanal 77, in Shtip on 7 October 2016.

Number of civil society representatives shared their experiences in the field of social inclusion and social entrepreneurship.

We started in 2005-2006”, said Aleksandar Lazarov from “Planetum” who was talking about the implementation of a network of informal plastic waste collectors. “Very quickly we successfully employed five people. The income we made was more than enough for those people to realize net salary of 25.000 denars (app. 500 CHF). Unfortunately, this activity was under attack from some political party skirmishes, because of that we are not implementing this activity for almost 2 years. The people are here, it is necessary to create fair chance to help them move away from the margins of the society.”

Still, is the employment enough when we talk about social inclusion? According to Beti Tolevska from KHAM from Delchevo, that is only one segment. “In the first attempts to employ Roma people we had conflict with the prejudice of the business”, she said. “We don’t want to employ Roma people”- that is what the businessman told us. But, we didn’t stop, we were working with our constituencies and with the business sector. We shattered the prejudices, and now we have to work on the improvement of the confidence of the Roma woman, and assure her that she is worthy”, said Tolevska. With employment of the Roma women, kindergarten for their children should be provided, they should be accepted from the other children, and the women should be accepted by their colleagues. According to the speakers, that is a step closer to the social inclusion.

According to Sokrat Manchev from Izbor from Strumica, opening of new jobs for stigmatized people is the biggest social inclusion. “Revolutionary changes should be done in the country social policy in order to have some movement, for example to gain more integrations. The country reduces the social policy to social help, and with that the results were and will be really low”, said Manchev.

Dimitar Apasiev from the University “Goce Delchev” from Shtip talked about social policy, which according to him is reduced to clientelism. According to Apasiev, employment doesn’t take out the employed from the poverty vicious circle. “Here, the coefficient of life happiness falls at the age of 25 and it doesn’t rise till the end of the life”, he said.

Zhermena Bozhinovska from Association for research, communication and development „Public“ presented their example connected with the magazine “Face in face” which almost four years works on the principals of social entrepreneurship. “Employment is the most appropriate way of social inclusion” says Bozhinovska explaining the selling of the magazine that is done by marginalized people. “The mentoring work has the biggest effect on their social behavior”, she said. Bozhinovska boasted about the recent employment of one salesman.

Prevention of migration and reducing of unemployment were the two topics discussed in the working groups. The research about the migration of the young people named “Return ticket” conducted by Media Plus was presented. Most of the respondents think that the measures taken by the government don’t respond to the conditions in the country (37%) or are not enough (29%). The reasons for the emigration of young people are mainly connected with the low income, insufficient for survival (71%) and impossibility for employment (19%). The research also showed that the young people don’t move out only from economic reasons.

Zlatko Nikolovski from the organization “New contact” thinks that the reason for the emigration of young people is the low level of employment and the bad conditions. “The migration policy should be changed” he said, and the civil organizations that work with migrations should work together”, he said.

Nevenka Longurova Girova from the Foundation for development of the local community presented the results from the analysis of the data about unemployed women that are part of the minority ethical communities in the Eastern region. According to her, most of the time it comes to Roma women at the age between 25 and 49 that don’t have or didn’t finish elementary school and most of them have been unemployed between one and three years.

Civica Moblitas forums enable space for articulation of ideas, and also common planning and preparation of actions. This forum was moderated by Daniela Stojanova from MCIC and Vesna Kolovska from Media Plus.