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This post is provided by our guest blogger Ingo Nordmann. Having gained his Master’s degree in Global Studies in Leipzig, Poland, and South Africa, Ingo has worked at the German embassy in Ghana and in intercultural management consulting.

If you’re 28 years old, with two university degrees, and your parents have invested all their money in your education, and you’ve done everything that was expected of you: if society then tells you, ‘sorry, we don’t have a job for you’, then it’s easy to understand why people revolt. We have to give young people hope. In Europe, the world’s richest continent, there has to be a place for young people, damn it!

With these words, Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, describes the heart of the problem. Most young, unemployed Europeans are not marginalized, deprived, and lazy, but they live in the centre of society – a society that seems to have no use for them. This is particularly the case in some Soutern European countries such as Greece and Spain where unemployemnt rates for young people are over 50% as compared to currently 8% in Germany. Youngsters from countries outside of the EU face even more severe challenges on the job market.

Recently, I went to the Balkans to gather some impressions from the beautiful, but often-neglected Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In the country’s second-largest city, Bitola, situated close to the Greek border on the foots of Pelister National Park, I talked to young people, to officials at the municipality, and to activists at the Business Start-up Centre Bitola, to find out how young people in this region evaluate the situation and what the government and NGOs are doing to change it.

Bitola’s main street – a popular meeting place for young people

During a training course supported by the EU’s Youth in Action Programme and YMCA Bitola, I had the chance to interview 22 young activists, volunteers, youth workers, and students between the ages of 21 and 28 from 10 countries. They mainly came from countries outside of the EU, namely Albania (3), Bosnia and Herzegovina (2), Kosovo (2), Macedonia (3), Serbia (2), and Turkey (3), while seven were from EU countries (Romania, Portugal, Poland, and Slovenia). Read the rest of this entry »