Talented young people, not only best performing students, but also activists with a contribution to the youth organizations, shared their ideas and opinions with the Prime Minister Edi Rama, wisely also forwarding a series of requests to the government on what can be done better for their future in their homeland.
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-Hello! For everyone to know, I would like to say that I am one of the many young people who were the first ones voicing readiness and expressing desire long time ago to return back home and invest for the future in my city. The Youth Council has been already established and operational in Fier and this is a reality. Fier has yet to host a long-promised university with specific degree programs and faculties to address priorities, the potential of this southern region and the capacity that has to become available to young people, as two vocational high schools operate in this city, producing excellent and skilled students and the city has the potential to offer employment and a career to these young people.
Prime Minister Edi Rama: I would like to set the record straight so that no confusion is created. We haven’t actually pledged to launch a university in Fier. Instead, we have explored the ways to open a faculty of medicine, nursing and health science, taking exactly advantage of the Memorial Hospital here. We are working on this project, yet launching a new faculty is not an easy undertaking like it was the case with the universities that used to pop up all over like the mushrooms overnight, with the students being fed with the illusion that they were being graduated, but what they were provided with was a useless diploma that offered them nothing at all.
Therefore, we are working on this and we are also working to promote internationalization of our universities as much as we can. We won’t be able to go too far with isolated universities. We need universities that establish relations with the leading international universities and adopt and share joint degree programs and curricula and common diploma in the medium term, which means that local students enrolling and attending universities in Albania be also provided the opportunity to be taught and graduated in European degree programs in collaboration with European higher education institutions. This way you would spend less than what you would be spending by attending a foreign university abroad, but instead attend an European degree program and be provided a worthy university diploma to embark on a successful career.
This is the ongoing effort we are making for the higher education system and the universities, but one should not a faculty of medicine, which is set to become a centre of excellence in collaboration with the Fier Memorial Hospital.
-As we all know, the city of Fier boasts a 25-km long coastline that is definitely envied by many other cities and areas across the country. The point is that given the area is home to a pristine or little explored coastline, what we and you in the central government, in cooperation with local government and Fier Mayor and our contribution, can do to transform this coastal line into an important tourist destination, a competitive one in the entire southern part of the country, offering at the same time employment opportunities for young people during the summer season?
Second, last year I was the winner of the national Olympiad in Albania with an absolute score. Although the incentive and the reward I was granted by local government was more than a satisfactory one, I think other students can be more motivated too through the central government contribution, because I have noticed that interest in Olympiads has diminished in recent years.
Prime Minister Edi Rama: We are about to hold another extended meeting later and you are all invited to attend, if you wish to do so, since I will give you two good news, particularly for you. In the meantime, I would like to congratulate you for your excellent performance and accomplishments in school.
The first news is that given the fact that Fier’s coastline is still untouched and you should normally be happy about this fact, because the same doesn’t go for Durres coastline, which has been touched very early on and a considerable part of it has been gravely damaged. The coastline here, being totally a virgin coastline, allows us to do things right. Why it was not done earlier? This is because we had to work and take Albania out of that dark area of a scandalous image. It was just a few years ago when the only international media reports and feature stories on Albanian tourism were negative ones. But Albania made the headlines of almost every website and international media providing news on tourism, with many of them suggesting Albania as a must-see global destination that visitors should not miss. The lack of projects has also to do with the land owners, as an overwhelming part of the coastal land is owned by various people. For these owners to launch investment projects, they should find interested investors, but time had to be ripe for the investors to come here and inject hundreds of millions of euros in investments.
An investment project is in the process and I very much hope that it can be finalized, because there many projects that can be launched, but never finalized. This is how business works.
The second good news for you is that – it has been actually decided by the previous government and it has been a very good initiative – a fund has been allocated to support the best performing Albanian students attending leading international universities. This state budget fund provided support for around 20 Albanian students each year, but none of them has returned back to serve his or her homeland after having received the money, although this financial support was provided to them in exchange of their contribution to the country after graduated. There even some of them who have returned back home, but they haven’t taken the trouble to write a letter and inform that they have been hired by large leading companies. They are actually very talented Albanian students, very skilled ones, but to be fair they had to inform us on their plans not to return back home after their graduation as they took up a job position they can’t turn down, while pledging to provide assistance and contribution in a manner or another.
We have decided to suspend this program and stop transferring money to students abroad, and instead provide it to the best performing students with grade point average 9 and 10 in our universities. We already awarded golden medals to the best performing students with grade point average 10. We awarded the golden medals to 132 high school students, 87% or 78% of them had decided to attend the Albanian universities. This is the category of students entitled to benefit support under this fund, providing them a monthly minimum wage. These students asking for the government support in order to keep performing excellently in schools will be all provided this super-excellence fund and a monthly salary of 34,000 lek.
We have now founded the sports teams, namely the boys’ and girls’ basketball and volleyball teams in all schools across the country.
After a series of meetings with high school students together with the Minister of State for Youth and Children to discuss issues concerning the next national youth strategy, we have collected many requests and demands and the most pressing one has been the request for the school labs. We will gradually deliver on this request to equip schools with modern labs. In the meantime, as far as the university is concerned, I already said and I repeat: We aim to enhance the university quality by introducing degree programs and curricula. We have already launched certified English degree programs being implemented in our universities. We will keep expanding such programs and be sure that the future will definitely be a much better one that the present. And the present is definitely better than the past.
Be sure that your future will be a better one!
Thank you!
