National Youth Council of Moldova (NYCM) is a non-political and non-governmental youth organisation that represents 58 youth organisations on both the local and national level. NYCM represents the interests of young people in Moldova and serves as a unique national platform for the youth sector. To promote youth interests in Moldova, NYCM contributes to the development of youth engagement structures by developing programs and activities for training, educating, lobbying and consultations.
NYCM not only has the role of promoting youth policy, but also monitors and evaluates how young people from different regions benefit from public budgetary allocations for youth activities.
The following report was compiled by the National Youth Council to achieve the organisation’s strategic objectives for the years 2014-2018 and to continue previous efforts in evaluating local public budgets, as seen in similar reports for 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.
The purpose of this report is to analyse the allocation and use of local public resources in the youth sector. Research objectives include determining the factors in improving local funding efficiency for youth policy implementation and creating a transparent process for consulting young people in local budget allocation. This report does not only follow a quantitative evaluation of local public budgets, but also discusses how to best manage allocated resources and what kind of youth activities to plan. Simultaneously, we present a qualitative evaluation of the structural composition of a youth budget, local policymakers’ perceptions on the nature of “youth activities” and local priorities in the youth section sector and their alignment with the National Development Strategy of the Youth Section Sector 2020.
In the process of strengthening local autonomy and youth policy decentralization, and taking into consideration that in 2015 the Ministry of Finances did not establish a percentage of local budgets to be allocated for youth development, there must be focus on the importance of funding in local youth policy development. Changes in the law regarding local public finances increases the vulnerability of the youth sector to funding shortages.