SARAJEVO (ILO News) – Alen Camic and Emir Slatina are both in their thirties. Alen used to work as a mechanic until he lost his job two years ago. Emir holds an MA in mechanical engineering and also became unemployed more than a year ago.

The two young Bosnians were among the first beneficiaries of the Support for Local Employment Partnerships (LEPs) project, an ILO intervention funded by the European Union to provide vocational training to the long-term unemployed and other vulnerable groups.

They both attended a three month on-the-job training to learn how to program and operate computers via CNC (Computer Numerical Control). The courses were provided by CEBOS, a local graphic design company in cooperation with the local employment office in Novigrad which is part of Sarajevo City.

CEBOS is producing tailor made pieces for the interior design of shops and could not find skilled labour in Bosnia. This is why they were interested to form a local partnership with the local employment office, a secondary school, and other companies to qualify the long-term unemployed as future employees.

Both Alen and Emir were hired immediately by CEBOS at the end of the training.

“In fact, all five participants got a job after the training. This shows that the on-the-job training fills a void on the labour market here in Bosnia-Herzegovina as it teaches skills that are in high demand in the private sector and immediately increase employability of participants”, explains Emil Krstanovski, the National Coordinator of the ILO in Macedonia.

Promising results at half time

Krstanovski was asked last November to run the midterm evaluation of a 4.4 Mio EUR project supporting local employment partnerships in Bosnia and Herzegovina from February 2016 to January 2019.

LEPs are tailor-made interventions agreed upon by local government, the social partners, businesses, schools and training institutions to come up with local solutions to specific employment challenges of a municipality or region. The partnerships benefit from the complementary roles of the partners, an approach that was developed in the late 1990s by the European Commission and later adapted by the ILO for the Western Balkans.

“It has proven to be a good approach as it mobilizes local resources and expertise, decentralizes policy making, and encourages innovation”, says Krstanovski.

What surprised him most was the project team’s enormous effort in reaching out to potential applicants for the competitive call for LEP proposals. The team went on the road and delivered within a few months 46 project presentations in 16 cities with a total of 687 participants. The response was enormous and in the end 157 applications were received.

A rigorous screening and selection process helped to select the best 15 proposals that received a grant for implementation. These 15 proposals are targeting at a total of 2000 people and should contribute to more than 600 new jobs.

Disadvantaged groups, including women, youth, minorities, returnees, internally displaced persons and hard-to-employ persons are being trained for professions in processing industry, agriculture, tourism, information technologies.

According to Emil it was essential that the project team continuously guided and supported the selected LEPs. His evaluation found that partner organizations were highly satisfied with the trainings provided. The average score of participants’ evaluations was 4.57 out of 5. So far, 599 participants have been trained of which 86 already found a new job.

Krstanovski is already thinking about a possible next phase of the LEPs. Should the programme be continued he recommends to invest more efforts into promoting success stories and exchanging experiences among the different LEPs. “More needs also to be done in order to achieve a better inclusion of women in the labour market”, he says.

“Overall we can safely say that the LEP programme in Bosnia and Herzegovina is an example for good practice on how to create jobs through decentralized responses to local labour market needs. Ideally, the programme should be scaled up in Bosnia and Herzegovina and be replicated in other countries of the Western Balkans.”