Regional governments and municipalities allocate funds to reduce unemployment

Public administrations in Spain, one of the countries with the highest youth unemployment rates in the European Union, are still allocating funds to enable a greater number of young people to find jobs, improve their working conditions, or learn a profession.

In the Basque Country, the Basque Employment Service -Lanbide– has recently approved four aid programmes designed to hire qualified young people, with a total investment of 8.2 million euros. The Lehen Aukera programme, which has been funded with 4 million euros, seeks to provide people under the age of 30 with their first job experience. Lanbide will subsidise open-term contracts that create net employment with up to 9,900 euros and up to 7,920 euros for work experience contracts lasting from six to twelve months.

The purpose of the programme called Youth Return (Retorno Juvenil) is to enable young people under the age of 30 working abroad or in other autonomous communities to return to the Basque Country. The businesses that hire these people will receive a subsidy worth 12,000 euros to pay part of the salaries in the case of open-term contracts, and the young people will be eligible for aid to meet travel expenses. The total amounts to 1.77 million euros.

The rest of the Lanbide aid will be dedicated to programmes designed to provide people under the age of 30 with work experience contracts in Basque companies that have work centres abroad and to encourage replacement contracts for part-time retirees. The campaign is directed at about 4,700 businesses that employ more than 30 people.

Balearic Islands

In the Balearic Islands, the Cabinet will allocate 8.48 million euros to finance the SOIB Joven-Cualificados programme, aimed at local entities. These funds will be used to subsidise full-time jobs for one year for 254 young people aged 18 to 29 who have higher education or professional qualifications and little or no work experience.

Most of the budget, 7.88 million, will be shared among the municipalities based on the number of unemployed people who are registered as looking for work in the island’s Employment Service. The rest will be allocated to the entities that submit projects that prioritise hiring young people with qualifications who display limited labour insertion rates.

Seville

The capital of Andalusia has also launched a new strategy to promote youth employment recently. Through two programmes, the City Council’s Social Welfare and Employment Office will dedicate 696,000 euros to subsidise businesses, self-employed workers, and non-profit entities that hire unemployed youths and training courses that focus on activities that need labour.

The first programme will be allocated 360,000 euros to hire young people aged 16 to 25 who lack the training to provide them with the necessary knowledge and experience. The goal is to enable these people to acquire the specific skills required to perform a job at their workplaces. In total, it will cover 40 one-year contracts and each company will be eligible for a maximum of 10.

The second programme is intended for young people aged 16 to 29 who are not in any type of training but are enrolled in the Andalusian Employment Service and in the Youth Guarantee System. There are a total of fifteen courses lasting from 215 to 285 hours, with language classes included, to train them to become home care workers, geriatric nurses, specialists in IT programming, assistant cooks, or tour guides, among other jobs.