THE STATE has used nearly all of €70 million allocated for creating jobs for young unemployed, Prime Minister Robert Fico said during a press conference held on November 8. Thanks to the projects targeting people younger than 29 years launched last November, the state created a total of 11,000 new jobs.
“It turned out we can create jobs for young people,” Fico said, as quoted by the SITA newswire, adding that though someone might say the number is not high, this is nevertheless a way to help young people during the crisis.
Labour Minister Ján Richter added that the average age of young people who have found work through the project was 23.5 years, while they were registered with the labour offices for 13.65 months on average. Most of the employed young people were graduates from secondary professional schools and vocational schools who found work in trade, industrial production and IT. The employers were mostly small and micro-sized enterprises, Richter added.
The minister also said that the success of the projects will soon also be reflected in jobless statistics, which should decrease by 7,000 people younger than 29 years, SITA reported.
Fico will attend a summit in Paris next week during which he will try to obtain more money for employing young people. He also wants to persuade his partners that the re-allocation of money is important, since part of the €70 million was collected through reallocating funds from other operational programmes, SITA wrote.
He also noted that the European Union has allocated €6 billion within its 2014-20 budget to support the employment of people younger than 25 years, of which Slovakia should receive €200 million. The country has to use another €200 million to receive the funds, Richter added, as reported by the TASR newswire.
Richter said that the problem in Slovakia is that only 27,000 people have a basic education. Therefore, they want to cooperate with the Education Ministry and use half of the funds for education projects. The second half should be used to create new jobs, TASR wrote.
Source: SITA, TASR
Compiled by Radka Minarechová from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
