JP Activate! – meeting with the partners

Dear partners and donors, dear colleagues and friends,

Please allow me to thank you for attending the SDG Pooled Fund - Partners’ Event, where there will be presented initial results and planned activities of the UN Joint Programme on Social Protection.

At the very beginning of our meeting, I would firstly like to give special thanks to our donors – the UN Members States, the EU, international agencies, private sector, and individuals - for recognizing the importance of this program, as without your support, the implementation of this program would not be feasible.

Additionally, many thanks to our key implementing partners, all institutions from Montenegro with whom we are cooperating on a daily basis - Ministry of Finance and Social Welfare, Ministry of Economic Development, Employment Agencies, Centres for Social Work, civil society organizations, but to beneficiaries, as well.  I would, of course, especially like to thank Mrs. Marija Stajovic, Director General for Social Policy and Child Protection, and to Mrs. Jevrosima Pejovic, Director General for Labor and Employment– for sharing their welcoming remarks with us.

And of course, many thanks to the colleagues from our UN agencies – UNDP, UNICEF, ILO, UNHCR, and IOM - who are diligently working on achieving objectives and results of this program, together with our implementing partners, always bearing in mind positive effects that it will have on end-users, on people of Montenegro.

This is the first meeting with the donors and partners in this format and will have one more before the project ends.

This project fits directly in the NSSD 2030, under the goal of stimulating employability and social inclusion, and is of course aligned with the UNDAF 2017-2021 focus on social inclusion.

The intervention is timely. The implementation of JP Activate! was very important when it started and is even more important now, due to COVID19.

The aim of this program is to strengthen the capacity of the social protection system in Montenegro to better serve people in need, by improving the effectiveness of social policies, as well as by delivering social services, especially to the most vulnerable groups. In light of the socio-economic crisis caused by COVID-19, Activate! has become even more relevant, given the increasing number of people that are at risk of falling into poverty and in need of social protection. Activate! activities thus focused on gathering real-time evidence of the impact of COVID-19, supporting the Government with policy simulations to model the potential impact of social protection reforms, using human-centered design for improving service delivery, as well as ensuring first-time access to social protection for the most vulnerable groups.

The key acceleration strategy of this project is innovation, at both policy/system level as well as at service-design level:

• at policy/system level, the programme will employ policy forecasting to ascertain the likely impact of social protection interventions, with a focus on poverty reduction, supporting decision-makers to accelerate evidence-based measures, whether through the social protection system or other means. Once modeling is achieved, policies with the optimum ratio between impact and cost can be proposed for further legislative activity. Just as importantly, such a tool could, once developed, can potentially be replicated for other sectors and across other countries (e.g., Western Balkans). It could also respond to decentralized planning and costing needs within Montenegro, to model local, regional, or national level policies.

• at service-design level, human-centered design will support co-production of services, active participation of targeted groups, and strengthen government-citizen feedback. Novel approaches to youth empowerment and employability will be reviewed using participatory monitoring and evaluation tools, such as randomized control trials, real-time feedback, or user satisfaction surveys.     

Colleague Michaela Bauer, UNICEF Deputy Representative will speak more about objectives and results, so I will leave that part to her, but would simply like to wrap up, very briefly, key achieved results in the first year:

• Two rounds of the UN Rapid Social Impact Assessment (RSIA) provided real-time data on the socio-economic impact of COVID-19, especially on vulnerable groups, as well as recommendations to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable groups;

• The policy simulations and modelling for poverty reduction, that willdevelop tools for planning and implementation of more effective social policies and design social policy options for poverty reduction;

• The Rapid Assessment of the Impacts of COVID-19 on the World of Work in Montenegro was conducted, as well as the analysis warning about the risks of a ‘lockdown generation’, proposing mitigation measures;
• The Social-Emotional Skills Programme was adapted for online use and roll-out in 2021, with a particular focus on the well-being and resilience of vulnerable young people;
• A human-centred design process for service delivery has started.

Once again, many thanks to our donors, partners and colleagues. I am looking forward to the rest of the meeting and I would not like to give the floor to Mrs. Marija Stajovic, Director General for Social Policy and Child Protection, Ministry of Finance and Social Welfare. 

Thank you.