Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at meeting with university students and professors engaged in the development projects under the 100 Villages Program, part of the sustainable integrated rural development model under the Rural Renaissance National Programme, a government initiative aimed at reviving the country’s rural areas:

First of all, I would like to thank each and every one of you, especially the group of individuals involved in this initiative.

It is an initiative of special importance to us as it represents a real opportunity to open up a new and advanced way to the approach to the problems, challenges, but also the potential of the territory of rural Albania, taking also into account a newly launched policy on agritourism development aimed at encouraging and involving as many families as possible in northern and southern rural areas of Albania. The initiative also aims at encouraging immigrants to look at and explore the exceptional opportunity the wealth of the country’s territory offers to many, if not all, to develop household economy through agrotourism.

We believe that by promoting agritourism and creating several model realities, we can trigger a chain effect that will definitely have a significant impact on rural development, youth employment rural Albania and certainly on social conditions as a whole.

This is a program that doesn’t end and limits our ambition in 100 villages alone, but it is designed to create models which then generate energy and expand development circle by providing concrete, meaningful and encouraging examples to many more people than those living in the territory of these 100 villages.

The program includes not accidentally selected 100 villages across the country. The villages were carefully picked in collaboration with the local government units at the country’s regions that combine a rich cultural heritage and amazing nature beauties, various traditions and are home to different typologies of development, architecture and climate diversity and so on and so for in order to create models that can inspire many others.

On the other hand, it is an effort to combine as many as different stakeholders, either governmental stakeholders – ministries, agencies, and local government authorities – as well as university and academic actors as an extremely important instrument for thousands of reasons.

The program will fill an objective gap, especially in the territory as many local government units face shortage of qualified human resources in planning and territorial development.

The project provides a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints from the university professors to students who will definitely offer their energy and ideas, which are an added value and will give us the opportunity to have to have a considerable number of projects within a relatively short time.

We should prepare a number of development scenarios and of course a very broad research base.

The national coordinator also touched upon on this topic, but we also plan to involve foreign universities in this project. This not a program which starts and completes within a short period of time. This is a long-term program, which will also serve to draw attention and include many other stakeholders, starting with the foreign universities we have been reaching out to through the diplomatic missions of various countries, which we have invited to join their forces with us, joining not only the financial resources, because many countries have allocated significant funding to support rural development or different aspects of development, but also sources of knowledge and expertise.

The program includes several components on the know-how among our village communities and rural communities of Switzerland, Germany or Austria. We are exploring all the opportunities and everything I mentioned are not merely desires, but already confirmed commitment, but we are looking to expand further, as it is the case with the already involved faculties, to pull a lot of energy into this program and create the needed critical mass of ideas and projects that should then materialize at a parallel stage I would say because actually we are here today in a village that is part of the program.

We have already launched a series of important interventions in this area. I am talking about the village of Vuno and the nearby coastal village of Dhermi where important projects on renovation of rural homes, the traditional architecture and construction elements are underway, plus the projects that have already completed in the coastal parts of either Jale or Dhermi. So the government has in parallel manner made interventions, not only here but also in other villages included in this program. So all these are so to say lanes that run in parallel to each other, but the Academy lane is fundamental because it will set a very important reference basis for what we will do next or for what institutions individually and then together will do in the future.

The Deputy Minister cited the Portugal’s lead in this field, which is one of the many other examples. You are university professors and students of a field, which forms the program’s development base and you know of course know a lot more than me about many aspects of urban or rural development, because you know how to treat the territory just like the body is treated during an acupuncture treatment to trigger the energy circle expansion. This is so to say the initial assumption about such a project, which, to conclude, I would say it is not limited in 100 villages only, because Albania has a lot more than 100 villages, but, on one hand, it provides the opportunity to create a model or a set of models within a certain model and an energy that will definitely spread towards the surrounding territories, inciting households and business, encouraging local government administration and ensure that the government’s presence and coordinating efforts be increasingly stronger by taking into account the data from the work of the 100 Villages Academy.

Since many of the participants expressed their appreciations, I would also like to thank each and every one of you for attending this meeting, especially those who arrived late as they were stuck in the congested traffic jam in Fier. I hope this will be the last year the road traffic is blocked in Fier. It is a gangrene that has develop over the years, but I believe that by October we will finally conclude a new contract and kick off work on construction of the Fier Bypass project, which will complete ahead of the next tourist season.

Thank you very much!