Speech of Prime Minister Edi Rama at the opening of the second call of the national program “National Labour Practice 2016”:

Welcome to our friends from Pristina who have joined this initiative which, in this second call, has taken a new dimension on a national level, because it opens the doors of the administration for the labour practices to all young men and women who speak Albanian and who belong to our nation.

When this program was launched, as every new thing in this country, it was seen with a lot of scepticism. I am convinced that the majority of the young people who became part of this program can prove that at first they did not completely believe that what they have actually benefited would happen.

This is a program of a great national interest, which is also a mutual interest both of the young people who find the path and take advantage of the opportunity to make an internship in the administration, and of the government who increases the human potential to improve the quality of an administration that is far from being a proper administration of a European country.

In the history of a country, there are things that can be done more quickly and some others that can be done more slowly, but without the slightest doubt the base of sustainability of success is determined by the sustainability and quality of the administration. From this point of view, Albania has been suffering a lot, and from a long time, from many years, and I believe that we are laying the stable foundations of a European administration, by focusing with all our forces and with a great will on the implementation of a new law on public administration, while facing, not without pain, the suffering caused to a great political force in power by the implementation of this law, because this is the truth.

It is a law that, in fact, separates eras in Albania, from an era where the administration was an extension of the electoral campaigns and their results, in an era where the administration is increasingly separated from the fate of the elections.

But beyond this, for newly-graduated young people, or for those who are in the early stages of their working experience and who live not only in Tirana, not only in Albania, but in Kosovo and elsewhere, this is a real opportunity because the program has a very relevant dimension of information and capacity increase through practice.

What has happened is that, as we committed, the best 200 people who were distinguished in the working practice through this program, were given the opportunity to sign a one-year employment contract. The one-year employment contract is not just an opportunity to work for a year, but it is an opportunity to prepare very seriously to become an integral part of the administration through the competition.

Those who have entered the competitions of public administration know very well that they are real competitions and very tough ones.

To those who do not believe in competitions I say just this: the fact that more than 1/3 of the competitions have no winners, shows that competitions are not prepared in advance or have prefabricated results.

The fact that in most cases competitions are won by young people after they have tried for the fourth, fifth or sixth time, after they have lost two, three times, and sometimes four and five times, shows again that to win these competitions a special preparation and a good experience in approaching them is required.

This program creates the prerequisite that those who want to continue working in the public administration should be first distinguished and receive a 1-year contract. Secondly, if they are not among the best and brightest, they should have a clear idea of how the administration functions, in addition to having a very good ground to prepare for competitions. And be convinced that this working practice helps not only those who want to work in our administration, in Albania or Kosovo, but also those who want to go elsewhere to work in the private sector, not only here but also abroad. Because experience from within the administration is an experience that is gained only if you are within the administration. You cannot understand it properly and as it would be useful, even from the position of an employee or manager in the private sector, how the state functions if you don’t see from within how the state mechanism works.

There are in this call today 2000 vacancies for internships in the Albanian Public Administration on a central and local level, and another 1.000 for the Public Administration of Kosovo, and everybody can apply, both from within and from outside. We like to believe that a lot of young people from Kosovo will want to work in the public administration in Albania, as there will be plenty of young people from Albania who will want to work in the public administration in Kosovo. This would be an added value of this joint program of national working practices, and would continue to feed a still very fragile seedling of our administration, eventually set on legislative basis and with the ambition to set European standards.

Our focus is on employment, and we are of course aware of the necessity to increase employment opportunities for the young people, but our administration is not an employment office, we do not see it as such, and we will do our best to wipe off this perception people have of the administration as an employment office, as a space in which those who need a job can settle in. Instead, we see it as a mechanism through which we create employment as well. So, increase the government capacity in carrying out its tasks, increase the quality of services to citizens by being an administration that functions as such, not as a shelter for salaries, and increase in this way the quality of human resources within administration.

You have often heard me say that at this stage we are facing a mindset created and consolidated over many years, according to which many unemployed young people looking for a job consider it such, provided that it is a government employment. At the same time, there is always a great majority of unemployed young people who reject a priori the idea of working in the private sector. This happens for many reasons, and one of them is because the administration has been misused and abused so much by parties and politics. It has been transformed for many years in the largest deformation of the democratic system here in Albania, and has functioned in view of paychecks in the form of rewards to those who were deemed the most important or the most fervent to the party. All in all, without taking into account that the cost created by such an administration is an extraordinary cost, and not an irrelevant one even to a party, especially to a big party such is the Socialist Party which now leads the ruling coalition.

There are 950 young men and women who did their internship at various institutions in Tirana and other Albanian cities and worked as interns at the national level. 650 of them, almost 65%, completed the first cycle of the employment as interns. Some of them were employed in various positions during the internship, thus creating a key access inside the administration. Meanwhile, the 200 best ones have entered one-year employment contracts. The data on the progress of their internship through the one-year contracts have shown that these 200 young people are generally a very valuable asset within the administration.

As the young man who spoke earlier witnessed, – he works in the Ministry of Energy, – these young people have been given the opportunity to have a part, to take responsibility and learn while exerting responsibilities that are not small. This is an added value for them, but is also an added value for the administration because the behaviour, the quality of the contribution they provide and above all, the ongoing increase in their capacity is clearly evident in the majority of them.

Today, we believe that this second call will create a wider space for more young people and for people who have greater ambition and are also much more willing to be involved in the affairs of the administration, by entering it through the front door and not by looking for back doors, because they are always smaller and are always closed. For it is impossible today to enter the Albanian civil service by bypassing the competition. I’m talking about the Albanian public service, about what is called the country’s public administration. Not every government structure is part of the public administration. There is a difference defined by law, but it is impossible today to enter this section, which is the core of the government functioning, without going through a very sophisticated and tough competition.

I want to believe that the coincidence of this initiative with the Summit of the Diaspora that we are organizing with the Ministry of the Diaspora of Kosovo as one of our main partners, will be one more incentive for the Summit itself, a new space of meeting, communication and interaction among Albanians from all over the world, here in Tirana, to give a new dimension to the meaning of the relations between the homeland and the state of Kosovo, in general between Albanian communities in the Balkans and all Albanian communities wherever they live, to give a dimension that has been missing for so many years, and to see together how we can increase the quality and volume of service to society and our country, by exploiting the great potential which we cannot say we have used in all these years, and which is made of all Albanians living abroad.

I sincerely thank the young men and women involved in this program, because they have been a concrete, tangible and clear example of the value that this program has. I encourage everyone to understand that this path, which apparently is the most difficult, is actually the easiest way to move towards the realization of the ambition of every one, if this ambition is to contribute within the structures of the public administration whether in Albania or in Kosovo.

I assure everyone, both those who will remain in the administration and those who are the majority and who will not remain in the administration, that this is an extraordinary and unrepeatable experience, because being given after graduation an opportunity to see from within how the state functions, means having an opportunity to connect more quickly than in a usual way with the tangible reality of things, to see the gap that exists between those who tell books and those who tell imagination, those who tell dreams and hopes and the reality that is a limited product of all that I mentioned earlier. But it is a product, the quality of which grows only by adding energies and strengthening the contributions coming from ambitions, in an endeavour to realize new dreams and hopes.

I am convinced that you who are in this program, and all those involved in the program, are brought here by your dreams and hopes. This is the most meaningful part of the program, and we have done our best and will do our best so that will not be a disappointment for any of you, but be instead a strong confrontation, without hypocrisy, with the reality of the administration as it is. It is not a rosy reality, but it is not a black one either. It is the complex reality of an administration that is far from being the administration Albania deserves to have, it is far from being the administration that Kosovo deserves to have, it is far from being the administration that our citizens deserve to have, and it is far from being an administration that can be easily compared with an administration of the European Union. But even in the EU, it depends on whom we compare it with, because it can be easier to compare it with the Greek administration, for example, with the administration of southern Italy, or the Romanian administration. Meanwhile, it cannot be compared with the administration of Germany, France, Great Britain, and so on.

The important thing is that this is the path. It is a path that will undoubtedly take its time. Those who have excellent administrations have not built them in a year, in a term, and even in a decade either; those administrations have been built over the decades, and sometimes even over the centuries. Whereas, we need not only to establish a reliable administration of European standards as soon as possible, but we have to establish it while dealing in the meantime with an ongoing tension created at the fundaments by a very rotten tradition that has transformed the administration in a “cannon fodder” for many years.

 

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The Ministry of Youth and Social Welfare launched the “Internship program Albania – Kosovo 2016” with an aim at including 2000 young people from Albania and the Diaspora in the working practice in the institutions of the public administration both at central and local level.

This is the first time that the program is being carried out in partnership with the government of Kosovo. Young people from Kosovo can apply for internship in the Albanian administration and vice versa.

The Minister of Social Welfare and Youth Blendi Klosi, together with the Kosovo Minister of the Diaspora Valon Murati, urged newly-graduated young people or those who are attending higher education wherever they live, to apply for internship in the Albanian institutions.