6th Forum of public employment services held today



The sixth in a row Forum of public employment services, organized by the Labour and Employment Agency of BiH and the Youth Employment Project (YEP) with the support of the Swiss Government, was held today under the motto “Start something good”. The central topic of the Forum was the support in launching business ideas. 

The Forum gathered about 100 entrepreneurs who had been given the opportunity to pursue their business ideas thanks to YEP, representatives of 32 municipalities in which the business ideas were realized and representatives of public employment services in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The aim of the sixth PES Forum was to encourage discussion on topics of key importance in boosting the entrepreneurial scene in BiH: profiling and training of potential entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship mentoring, models of financial support and social entrepreneurship.  In that context, the Forum presented the results of YEP business incubator that helped, in cooperation with 32 local communities, to activate 1200 potential entrepreneurs and provided financial and expert support in starting more than 100 businesses in 2018.

In his opening speech at the Forum, Željko Tepavčević, Deputy Director of the Labour and Employment Agency of BiH said that “the Forum has become a venue recognized for the quality of its panel discussions and a careful selection of participants because it facilitates the exchange of experiences and good practices of all public services in an already complex system that exists in BiH.  Practical results justify the existence of the Forum.”  

“Today, we will be discussing the results of the YEP business ideas incubator, the cooperation with local communities, the linkage with public employment services and challenges faced by entrepreneurs with the aim to offer innovative models of business financing, mentoring programmes for beginner entrepreneurs and profiling models for potential entrepreneurs, in particular those coming from the group of the unemployed, and ultimately, social entrepreneurship as one of the proposed responses to the concerns in society which the state could not resolve on its own”, stressed Mr. Tepavčević.

Ranko Markuš, PhD, Director of GOPA Representative Office in BiH, said that “we will present the results of our cooperation with local communities today. We are proud to have facilitated the activation of 1200 young people who had applied to the public call and presented their business ideas and to have enabled for 600 of them to join the business incubation process and that 100 of them have started their own business.”  

“It is my great pleasure to present today the results concerning social entrepreneurship that is specific by its dealing with the identification and solving of social problems such as social exclusion, poverty, unemployment, environmental pollution, etc.  Unlike traditional entrepreneurship, where the primary aim of action is profit generation and maximization, the focus of social entrepreneurship is to accommodate social needs.  Therefore, social entrepreneurship represents a significant driving force of social and economic development”, said Mr. Markuš.