Prime Minister Edi Rama is on an official visit to London, where he attended the fifth EBRD Summit on investments in Western Balkans, which took place at EBRD Headquarters in London and was attended by all six heads of government from the region.

The aim of the Summit is to highlight potential investment and business opportunities in the Western Balkans region and to promote regional and cross-border projects. Today, the EBRD remains one of the largest institutional investors in countries of the region.

Prime Minister Edi Rama attended the Summit’s interactive session with participation of the six Western Balkans Prime Ministers, including extended question and answers with foreign investors, with leaders of participating countries and the EBRD President expressing to the audience their overall vision on the region, key regional projects and investment opportunities at a regional level and in each country in the region, namely Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.

PM Rama answered to the audience interest regarding Albania’s concrete investment potentials, priorities and development perspectives of the country.

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-Mr. Rama, why should investors put their money into your country? Why should the private sector engage?

PM Edi Rama: First of all allow me to join in this venue in expressing full solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine.

Let me start by saying I strongly believe that investing in Albania or in any other countries in the region attending this summit here is more than merely investing in a country. It is actually investing in a region with incredible still untapped potential.

As a matter of fact, I believe that the Western Balkans are the new frontier for investment in Europe, exactly due to what has made them a non-reachable destination for so many years.

On the other hand, Western Balkans are also the new frontier for investment due to the fact that all the countries in the region are improving and are doing their best to do more. As for Albania individually, I believe that we have ushered in a new phase now as it is very obvious to the people that visit Albania and see Albania as a heaven for tourism and for investing in tourism.

I am not going to bother you by providing figures, because we in the Balkans have this kind of inner push to say: “We had the highest; we had the biggest; we had the most incredible…” and so on and so forth. So, I am not going to join this choir of incredible things, but I am just going to say that we, even during the worst moments of the pandemic, we have seen a very revealing increase of our tourism industry.

On the other hand, we are now seeing more and more things happening in our energy sector, which is a very strategic, not only for us, but also for the times we live.

We are now working on major energy investment projects in collaboration with foreign companies.  The same also thanks to the Commissioner Várhelyi’s stance and his push to bring the European Union closer to the Balkans in real terms.

We are seeing some new paths being opened for our infrastructure and our rail network in particular. I very much hope we will be able to do a lot more, and I specifically hope we will be able to get through with Kosovo, on one hand, namely about the Durres-Prishtina railway, and with North Macedonia, on the other hand, namely Corridor 8 project, which are basically the two main directions that will give an additional impetus to the economy, not only to the Albanian economy, but also to the economies of Kosovo, North Macedonia and the whole region.

This is more or less the picture and, as I already said, I am not going to provide numbers and data, because we are all incredible.

-What are your priorities? Can you briefly name three of them?

PM Edi Rama: Energy has definitely become a central point for everyone and we are working on it since day one when we took office. We are now moving towards delivering on the goal to build an energy independent country by practically fulfilling the investments already underway. We face the problem of being totally dependent on hydropower sources, which makes us a country with 100% renewable energy, but at the same time this comes with the vulnerability of being dependent just on one energy source. What we are doing now is that we are focusing on diversification of energy and we are now seeing investments in solar energy projects, while investment projects on eolic energy are being prepared. However, the major effort is being put in hydro electricity projects to complete the whole system in a way that would make us energy-wise independent.

Our second priority is tourism, which is of course strongly connected with the infrastructure and  I am talking about the Blue Corridor, which is also part of the European network, part of the Berlin Process and it is part of what we have put together in cooking, so to say, with Commissioner Varhelyi and we will now push for its implementation in terms of the highway and, in the meantime, we are now very happy that a railway will be built along the same corridor, as it has been already approved.

On the other hand, we have launched investments in ports, new tourist ports, as well as the new commercial port in Durres, which will practically completely transform the whole picture of the country as a tourist destination with four new tourist ports, while the commercial port will be relocated outside the city of Durres.

This is also the case with the new airports. Construction of a new airport in the country’s northeast has already completed and work is underway on construction of a new airport in south, and preparations are underway for construction of a fourth airport further south on the border with Greece.

And the third priority, if I would put it this way, is full digitalization and investing more in familiarizing young people with technology as much as possible.

Around 95% of our public services are now fully delivered digitally and we have practically changed the relation between the citizens and the state services, by totally eliminating paperwork.

There are still a very small number of public services that require in person contact, namely when you have to apply and obtain a new passport or an ID that require digital fingerprinting.

We plan to shut down all the offices and service windows tasked with delivering public services in the coming months and every public service will be practically provided online only.

In the meantime, we are putting a lot of effort in education system to bring more and more kids to this new world of technology. Thank you.

–     Thank you very much indeed, Edi Rama. The Eastern German Business Association is asking: Where do you see the biggest challenges, but also the opportunities of the region in implementing the climate goals defined by the European Green Deal and the Sofia Declaration on the Green Agenda for the Western Balkans. How far along are the plans on implementation of the green agenda in each of your countries and what role do you see foreign direct investments playing in renewable?

PM Edi Rama: I believe we are among the very few countries still having the same unchanged pre-crisis electricity price for consumers, especially for the household and small businesses. We are doing extra efforts to keep it like this although the trend is going to a totally different direction and the last year predictions. Anyhow, we have now entered a new phase by completely changing the model of our energy system in terms of electricity export and imports by introducing energy storage, which we are seeking to increase further. At the same time, after very two successful tenders for construction of photovoltaic parks and the start of the groundwork after the whole preliminary work done by the renowned French company Voltalia, we are moving forward and have already gone beyond the preliminary studies on the wind power. We believe there is a big potential for us to get considerable additional amount of renewable energy from the offshore production and at the same time we are also exploring hydrogen production through the photovoltaic parks.

We believe that all this is going to increase and diversify our energy production, but hydropower remains our most important source and that’s why we are now investing in a very large project, which will practically allow us to finally have the missing element of our system, which is a balancing dam project, about which we are very closely working with the United States, along with the natural liquefied gas production, which is set to start in the coming weeks thanks to the agreement with American partners.

–      The question comes from the French Employers Federation and they are asking what kind of tourism do you envisage developing as part of your economic development strategy?

PM Edi Rama: When it comes to tourism, among all the incredible we are the most incredible ones, because we are blessed with sea, mountains, rivers and lakes. Practically we have a lot of opportunities although traditionally we have been used to explore the maritime tourism only and differently from some other countries we don’t have yet any serious investment in mountainous tourism, but things are starting moving in this direction. At the same time, we are also adding, for example – I am sure everyone here is familiar with the Vjosa River, which is Europe’s last wild river, and we are working now on designing the transformation and development plan to transform Vjosa River into a fully protected zone and into a partly national park, which would practically mean a lot and by partly I don’t mean a small area, but it is about really a huge space with an immense potential to develop a different kind of tourism.

So, I think we are blessed with all that and as the question was asked by French federation, I would like to inform them that we have a very active presence of Accor group, whose presence was unimaginable just a few years ago, but Accor is now working and is being awarded more and more contracts each year to establish its brands. The work is also underway with other international leading brands. So, I think we are on a god direction in this aspect.

–     The last question from the audience that is asking about digital economy and transition to the digital economy and how important is this going to be in the next targets for countries in the region?

PM Edi Rama: I think I touched upon the digitalization earlier, so I am not going to repeat that we have practically digitized all the public service delivery system. At the same time, we are putting new emphasis on new IT education. I would like to add that we are now in a process to adopt and will soon forward to parliament a very revolutionary legislation on the start-ups and the digital nomads that will practically make Albania the most incredible and most liberal nation in terms of applying no regulations about start-ups and digital nomads, not only in the region, but in the whole world and possibly all over the planet. Thank you!