Thursday, 25 March 2021 – In preparation for the third UfM Med4Jobs Stakeholders Dialogue envisaged for 2022, the seventh Med4Jobs Advisory Board Meeting will take place online on 25 March 2021 to discuss a broad array of employment-related issues that range from informal employment and the future of work and skills to opportunities offered by Blue Economy and digitalization, the future role of MSMEs in economic transformation and labor generation, among others issues. In addition, some of the UfM-labelled projects under the umbrella of the Med4Jobs Initiative that showed interest in sharing their progress will be given the floor to share important updates on the state-of-play and the next steps for their work in the region.
In the Co-Presidency Statement emanating from the V Regional Forum of the Union for the Mediterranean, the UfM Ministers of Foreign Affairs stressed that “efforts must be focused on the crucial employment challenges, mainly for young people.” Ahead of the Fifth UfM Ministerial Conference on Employment and Labour that is planned for 2022, the discussion is aimed not only at exchanging experiences and showcasing best practices and success stories, but also at generating pertinent and pragmatic ideas that could potentially feed into the 2022 Ministerial Declaration.
Launched in 2013, the Mediterranean Initiative for Jobs (Med4Jobs) is a UfM flagship project-based, cross-sectoral initiative, that has eventually become a pipeline of projects addressing a broad spectrum of employment-related challenges in the UfM Region, with over 100,000 beneficiaries, mostly young people and women in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. Med4Jobs has 14 labelled projects under its umbrella, some of which have been successfully concluded.
The Med4Jobs Advisory Board which brings together several regional and international organisations has as its key objectives the selection of best practices, the contribution to the promotion of job creation and SME development, and the coordination of regional actions and efforts in the employment field.