prijava
SARAJEVO, June 8 (FENA) - Secretary-General of the Regional Cooperation Council, Majlinda Bregu, wrote in her op-ed that about 68 percent of the citizens of the Western Balkans see the COVID-19 virus pandemic as a threat to their own or their family members' jobs.
The lockdown brought high unemployment rate rise in the Western Balkans, between 5% and more than 30%. But without modern technologies that enabled working from home and saving jobs, that number would have been even higher. 38% of our citizens see COVID-19 pandemic as a threat to their job or jobs of their family members and 35% are impatient to get back to work, the latest data from RCC's Balkan Barometer show.
The Western Balkans (WB) Digital transformation agenda 2021-2024, financed by the European Union, is under preparation and will be the backbone for the socio-economic recovery of WB, strongly and timely anchored with the EU recovery efforts.
Balkan Barometer 2020 shows that 80% of managers in WB consider digital skills very important for conducting their businesses and 55% of WB companies provide some form of training to upgrade their workers’ digital skills.
"The European Commission estimates that nearly 90% of jobs in the near future will require certain digital skills. The middle class is declining in our region. Youth and women unemployment or underemployment is epidemic in all our economies," underlines Bregu.
Back in 2000, there were only 361 million Internet users worldwide. Sounds so outdated right, as nowadays this number accounts for barely two-thirds of the Facebook users.
"Back then, 20 years ago, the top 10 countries were the vast majority on the Internet - 73% of all the users. None of these top countries were coming from our region. In 2019 there were 4.5 billion3 internet uses across the globe. Our region even started picking up in the last two decades - according to 2019 statistics Western Balkans had approximately 15 million internet users, and only around 17% of the citizens in the region do not use it, mostly those over 65+ age," stressed Bregu.
Western Balkans is usually seen as a region that still doesn't keep up the pace with the technology of the most developed countries, but this situation has shown us how fast we can adapt. With the spread of social media, messaging and calling apps 69% of Western Balkan citizens use the Internet as a communication tool. Surely Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger ring a bell. A little more than a year stands between us and zero roaming costs in the entire region, a roaming free Western Balkans (an initiative that became impeding as of April 2019 when RCC and EU facilitated the deal between all WB6), so this trend will continue rising.
Bregu finally notes that digital transformation puts Western Balkan economies under constant pressure to make this a top priority for businesses and economic growth. The technology upshift will have a knock-on effect on the wider industry, enhancing and adding value to work, but only if we learn how to harness its power for the right purpose.
(FENA) S. R.
