The Western Balkans, comprising Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, has witnessed continuous rural depopulation, largely due to the lack of economic opportunities, poor infrastructure, and limited access to quality education. Many rural households rely on subsistence farming, which is increasingly unsustainable due to fragmented land ownership, limited access to modern technology, and climate change-induced environmental challenges. As a result, rural youth and working-age adults often migrate to urban centres or abroad in search of better employment opportunities and improved living conditions.
Rural activities in different agricultural and rural tourism sectors are currently facing serious challenges also due to a continuously drained labour force that until some years ago provided a competitive advantage to produce with low costs. Without using innovation and other technological solutions to compensate for the labour force, many of the rural economic activities will be facing a question of survival.
The innovations and technological solutions need to be adopted in all elements of agricultural value chain, be it long or small, but most importantly innovations and technical solutions must be very much linked to research and education of future generations. Without investing in skilled and knowledgeable future caretakers, the prospect of rural areas will be rather bleak. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ GmbH) is working with public and private partners in specific countries but also at the regional level to tackle some of the challenges and work together towards finding suitable and sustainable solutions. For instance, in Albania, GIZ is implementing a programme called “Sustainable Rural Development”, which focuses on agriculture and rural tourism. In the agricultural component, SRD is focused on introducing biological control in greenhouse production, fertigation and smart decision-making in apple orchards, just to name a few. The adoption of these technologies provides multiple benefits, ranging from economic ones for farmers and value chain actors, environmental and biodiversity protection to addressing climate change and European Green Deal. This element is very important for accessing higher value markets and meet product safety requirements. Agritourism is another element that could contribute positively to rural economies as well as serving as stewards of the nature.
A similar targeted approach has been taken also at the regional level for the Western Balkans. The regional project “Support to economic diversification of rural areas in Southeast Europe (SEDRA II)” implemented by GIZ and SWG RRD, aims to improve the employment and income perspectives in the six Western Balkan countries (WB-6) in accordance with the EU pre- accession process. The project aims to strengthen the capacities of regional, national and local actors and to create adequate framework conditions for economic diversification against the background of the structural challenges in rural areas. It strengthens local entrepreneurial competitiveness and regional added value in the Western Balkans by promoting employment generating and income-generating value chains in tourism and agriculture.
Considering the current dynamics in terms of climate change but as well as global economic connections, it becomes even more important to continuously invest in research and preparing skilled labour force that would be able to address these challenges and take the rural areas ahead.
Offering the freedom to drive innovation in an economy is crucial to tackle these challenges. The project “EU4Innovation” drives these factors, by enabling start-ups, SMEs and academia to engage and explore opportunities and solutions for real life challenges. Driven by ambition of the EU to increase and deepen its partnerships with the Western Balkans, the Commission increasingly opens access for non-member-countries to the European Framework Programs. EU4Innovation is mandated to create tangible and long-lasting partnerships between Quadruple Helix actors from EU member states and the Western Balkans. Enabling academia and private sector to discover, understand and engage in suitable EU framework programs, offers tremendous opportunities to discover solutions and mutually benefitting fields of cooperation. Next to the scientific benefits, this agnostic approach offers direct economic benefits to solution builders and users as well as creating positive effects fostering a liveable rural environment and the transformation towards a knowledge-based economy. The session will be organized by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ GmbH) and will serve as a dialogue platform aiming at:
• Sharing experiences with regards to the addressing challenges, and needs of the countries in relation to improvement of quality of life in rural areas in the Western Balkans, as well as to improve their resilience and enhance their economic development.
• Sharing experiences related to approaches, tools and functional mechanisms used to address climate related risks, improve quality of life, employability and address the migration of Western Balkans rural areas.
Different speakers will focus on the innovative approaches, best practices used by GIZ and lessons learned in the implementation of the various projects, and their contribution to improvement of rural resilience, economic development and access to knowledge networks.
The discussions aim at triggering exchange between development cooperation and science community, create an open space for the identification of opportunities and inspire follow-up cooperation ideas.
