One of the goals of the local authorities participating in the European Union’s project called SEEMIG is to keep the creative youth of Seklerland behind the borders. The Romanian participants of the European Union financed project are Harghita County Council, Municipality of Sfântu Gheorghe and the National Minority Research Institution based in Cluj-Napoca, who are dealing with the thorough analysis of demographic processes and the labor market in Seklerland, as well as with organizing the regular data collection concerning social and economic processes. Recently the leaders of the project organized a partner meeting on 22nd and 23rd of May in Budapest, Hungary. On behalf of Harghita County Council, Mrs. Erika Dobos, project manager attended the meeting. At the meeting EU projects were presented that reviewed different aspects of the migration, searching for correspondences and good practices that could be related to the SEEMIG project. On the first day of the project partner meeting a conference was organized at the Central Statistics Office. The presentations were held by the employees of the Serbian Statistics Office, Hungarian Central Statistics Office, Central European University and the Michigan University in the domain of migration and demographic changes.
There were also workshops during the meeting focusing mainly on strategy building. They reviewed the effects of emigration on the demographic and labor-market related processes, and the importance of statistical data in the local and regional development strategies. They were searching for answers regarding the role of projects in stopping the brain drain, and also discussed the long term implementation of the project.
On the second day, on 23rd of May, the discussions concerned the future tasks related to project management, and experts held consultations on studies concerning the historical overview of migration.
The SEEMIG – Managing Migration and Its Effects in South-East Europe is a strategic project, which aims to widen the databases concerning migration, and to offer assistance through this to political decision makers and national officials in working out strategies. The expected outcome of the project concerning HarghitaCounty is a more extensive analysis of demographic processes and labor market, and in the same time it will be an opportunity to organize a continuous data collection regarding economic and social processes. In addition it may serve the base for laying down the foundation of future programs and development strategies in the concerned field as well. The participation in the project means new possibilities to realize action-plans, strategies and intervention policies, and also to decrease emigration and to handle the socio-economic consequences of labor market changes.
Budapest, 24th of May 2013
Leave a Reply