Ensuring access to job opportunities in rural areas discussed at Economic Council

A new meeting of the Women’s Economic Empowerment Working Group was held to discuss how to ensure access to employment opportunities as well as training and career and business counselling in rural areas. The lack of employment opportunities at local level, for various reasons, leads rural people to migrate to urban centres or to start an entrepreneurial activity, but which also requires an initiation. Entrepreneurship alone is a source of survival and livelihood for many rural women, often undertaken part-time due to domestic responsibilities. At the same time, the lack of or limited access to information on employment services, guidance, counselling, means of finance and so on in rural areas, alienates women from local economic life.

Thus, the working group members concluded that there is a need for more information tools on local employment opportunities and for more community actors to use these communication tools in relation to the population. In particular, business incubators, hubs, business support centres, community libraries, town halls, post offices, multifunctional centres of the Public Service Agency and the Unified Public Service Delivery Centres (CUPS) could support the work of the National Employment Agency in those localities where there is a long geographical distance to the nearest territorial office of the Agency. To this end, the Working Group encouraged the development of collaborative partnerships between various community stakeholders and the National Employment Agency (ANOFM) to ensure greater access for the rural population to employment services, training, coaching, career and business guidance and counselling.

Another recommendation was that ANOFM, both for job seekers and for rural companies and businesses, should conduct regular media campaigns on reliable sources of information on employment and training, to prevent the so-called employment traps that have multiplied recently on various platforms.

At the same time, as one of the recommendations, it was proposed to make the most of the links between urban and rural associations of women entrepreneurs in order to increase the flow of information (resources, funding, supply and demand), exchange experiences and improve access for rural women to various fairs and exhibitions.

These and other recommendations voiced at the meeting will be turned into an information note by the Economic Council Secretariat in the next two weeks and forwarded to policy makers in the light of the reform on improving the services provided by ANOFM.

Removing barriers to equal access to resources and improving women’s access to participation in the labour market are among the objectives of the Roadmap for Women’s Economic Empowerment developed by the Secretariat of the Economic Council under the Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova, with the support of UN Women and the financial support of Sweden.

The Secretariat of the Economic Council to the Prime Minister is supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, funded by the UK Government’s Good Governance Fund, and the International Finance Corporation’s Investment Climate Reform Project funded by the Government of Sweden’s International Development Agency.

The Secretariat of the Economic Council to the Prime Minister is supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, funded by the UK Government’s Good Governance Fund.