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A young entrepreneur in Pristina

ADA

Kosovo Counts On Its Youth

Europe’s youngest nation also has Europe’s youngest population. Meet the bright sparks hoping to improve a dark situation.

by Chris Cummins

Reality Check Special: Rebooting Kosovo, Saturday, 25th of June, 12-1 on FM4

Meeting Donjeta Sahatciu in an office in one of the hilly suburbs of Kosovo’s pre-fabricated capital Pristina, proved a refreshing surprise. It was a spark of hope amid a rather dreary backdrop.

The 26-year old is the executive director of a Kosovar start-up called Rrota and she was talking about her troubled homeland as a youthful dynamo on an ageing continent

“I want to stick around in Kosovo. I have no plans to leave,” she told me. “I have really high hopes that things will get better and better here.”

A Bleak Picture

Such optimism was invigorating because much the data I have read about Kosovo in the months before my visit had been depressingly bleak; particularly in regards to the young generation. 60% of Kosovars under the age of 24 are unemployed and even those who do have a job often struggle to get by.

Research has sugegsted that most Kosovans have to get by on an income of less than 500 euros a month. Some families rely on a single bread winner on salary of as little 70 euros try to get by and because the country is reliant in imports, domestic prices are rising.

Pristina

CC BY-SA 2.0 von David Bailey auf flickr.com/photos/davidbaileymbe/

CC BY-SA 2.0

As the economic situation has failed to pick up in the 9 years since Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, the patience of its 1.8m population has been stretched to the limit and sometimes beyond.

There have been riots in Pristina while in the country’s parliament, as well as the predictable votes of no confidence; there have also been physical altercations climaxing, last March, with tear gas and pepper spray attacks on MPs.

Add into this an air pollution problem in the capital Pristina, fuelled by a reliance on dirty coal power plants that makes the winter air hard to breathe.

Roads instead of health?

There are also accusations of economic and social mismanagement mismanagement.In the jounrnal Prishtina Insight, journalists Shqipe Gjocaj complains that the 2016 budget for roads was 210.2 million euros on roads and 180.5 million on health care.

Roads instead of health

Chris Cummins

Roads instead of health?

Many Kosovars have voted with their feet in a mass exodus of both the talented and the desperate that reached its peak in 2014 and 2015. Now, one in four Kosovars lives abroad and 13% of the country’s GDP comes from remittances.

Young and Internet-savvy

Donjeta was aware of the toll that the brain drain has taken on her country but believes it is possible for motivated young Kosovars to build a successful career in their homeland; partly because of the youthfulness of the country. Half of the population is under the age of 28. Raised in the digital age they are impressively internet-savvy. Indeed, by the year 2015, some 84% of the Kosovars were online.

“There is a lot of energy here that we can channel,” Donjeta told me. “We do a lot of internships here. We take people on their school holidays and teach them how to code. We love to see the potential here.”

A Helping Hand

Entrepreneurship, however energetic, often needs a helping hand. Rrota has been supported with 116,000 euros (and valuable connections) from the Austrian Development Agency (ADA).

Sahatciu’s start-up develops, among other projects, software that banks use to keep their safety deposit boxes secure. They work with customers in Germany and Austria as well with governmental departments in Kosovo.

Inside Rrota

ADA

The Rrota office is determinedly hip. Soft electro music oozes out of the office speakers and there’s a ping-pong table for office hour distractions. “We’ll all millennials,” laughed Donjeta, “We like to mix work with pleasure.”

The Balkans has often been viewed as the Wild East by investors and there is no denying that corruption has hampered trust in Kosovo. The county ranked 95 in Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index, scoring the same as countries such as Benin, El Salvador and Sri Lanka.

Donjeta said she’s aware of the prevalence graft in her country but it hasn’t affected Rrota and that she hadn’t noticed any prejudice against her company based on its Pristina address. Indeed she told me she’d like to be part of the movement to redefine her young country’s reputation.

“There are still problems accessing the financial resources we need,” she says, “but in the past two years loads of small start-ups have set up business here. It is a place of opportunity.”

Farming For The Future

My visit to Rrota was not my only surprise on my brief trip to Pristina. In a non-descript neighbourhood near a main highway, lay what authorities hope is the building block for a new high-tech agricultural future for this fertile patch of the Balkans.

The Abdyl Frasheri agricultural school consists of a small block of classrooms facing a state-of-the art laboratory, refurbished with support of funds from the EU and from ADA. There I met students in white lab coats and plastic hair caps, who handed me a deliciously rich strawberry juice pressed out of mad-scientist’s contraption of shiny stainless steel.

It might seem unusual in digital age Europe to be focussing on agriculture, but the sector is currently the highest producer of job vacancies, as Arianit Kransniqi, explained as he showed me around a plastic-roofed greenhouse filled with a jungle of leafy vegetables.

A greenhouse in Kosovo

Chris Cummins

Arianit Kransniqi

Arianit works for an organisation called ALLED. In Albanian the acronym means Aligning Education with Labour Marker Needs and it does what it says on the tin. Arianit and his colleagues find out what skills employers would like young Kosovars to have and then take those suggestions to schools and vocational training centres to try and tailor the education to fit those requirements. The project has benefitted from 700.00 euros of Austrian aid money.

Adi Kovacevic is ALLED’s team leader. “In recent years Kosovo’s education system has produced graduates that have been able to find a job, either at home or abroad.”

Employable Skills

Kosovo, which currently lists its biggest export as scrap metal, desperately needs direct foreign investment and investors look for appropriately skilled workforces.

“We’re aiming to develop a system that is able to plan education for the future. The few funds that we have would be invested in the occupations that are needed for the economy.”

At the labs I met Flandrit Kransniqi, who was among the few young Kosovars without job pressure. His dad, also a graduate of the Abdyl Frasheri school, works some land in a village 60km west of the capital and Flandrit wants to use to skills here learns here to increase productivity on the family farm. “I’m learning more every day,” he told me.

Here is a student called Flandrit

ADA

Flandrit

That’s another benefit of the project, said Arianit Kransniqi: students like Flandrit are enthusiastic about building a livelihood in rural areas. In many developing parts of Europe villages have been abandoned to the sick and elderly while the young and dynamic look for often non-existent jobs in the city but Kosovo is beginning to buck that trend. Reinvigorating agriculture means reinvigorating village life.

“The majority of people live in rural areas,” says Arianit, “and so supporting agriculture means keeping communities healthy.”

And it’s time that Kosovo made use of its land. “It’s so fertile here,” says Arianit. “You can grow almost anything here.” Yet Kosovo is incapable of feeding itself. Even onions and garlic are shipped over from Egypt.

Adi talks to Chris

ADA

Adi Kovacevic

”Although 60% of Kosovars are in some way involved in agriculture, 80% of Kosovo’s food is imported,” complained Adi Kovacevic. “That’s a sign that we have to do something.”

Developing the tools for a modern, efficient and productive agricultural sector might not solve all of the fledgling country’s problems, but it seems like a good building block.

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