The Berlin Work Plan names Roma, but will it reach them?

In the Western Balkans, employers are saying the same thing: they cannot find workers. Construction firms delay projects, manufacturers turn down orders, and service sectors operate below capacity. "Employers across the region are struggling to fill vacancies while our own citizens remain in demand abroad," Amer Kapetanovic, Secretary General of the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC), said recently. And yet, at the very same time, hundreds of thousands of citizens remain excluded from the labour market.

 

Earlier in May in Berlin, labour ministers from all six Western Balkan governments adopted a new Work Plan on Employment and Social Policy under the Berlin Process. It is a real step forward. The plan explicitly mentions Roma, alongside women, older workers, and people with disabilities, as groups that should benefit from employment measures. "We want to secure employment, create good working conditions and strengthen participation. It is about opportunities and prospects for people in the Western Balkans," Germany's Labour Minister Bärbel Bas said at the meeting.

 

But the region has heard this language before.

 

For more than twenty years, governments have adopted strategies, declarations, and action plans on Roma rights. The problem is not the lack of commitments. The problem is that employment policies are still designed for people who are already halfway inside the system: people with formal qualifications, work experience, stable addresses, documents, connections, and enough confidence to navigate bureaucracy.

 

The people who most need these jobs are rarely the ones they are designed for.

 

Take Roma. They are consistently identified as a priority group but remain largely absent from the programmes meant to support them. Throughout the region, Roma face structural unemployment, limited engagement with public employment services, and heavy reliance on informal work: waste collection, street trading, scrap metal, seasonal construction. These activities generate income, but no contracts, no stability, no social protection.

 

The numbers reflect this exclusion. Census figures show Roma employment rates as low as 13.9 per cent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, around 20 per cent in Serbia and Montenegro, and just over 22 per cent in North Macedonia — all below even the modest 25 per cent regional Berlin Process target. Among young Roma, more than half are not in employment, education or training. Among women, the gap is even wider: just 38 per cent are employed, compared to 69 per cent of Roma men. And discrimination compounds every one of these figures: one in four Roma report being denied a job because of their ethnicity.

 

But when you look at who actually benefits from employment programmes, Roma participation is rarely more than symbolic. In Montenegro, fewer than 20 Roma per year access active labour market measures, mostly through short-term public works. In Serbia, participation has increased, but remains concentrated in low-impact schemes, with very limited access to employer-based training or stable jobs. In North Macedonia, stricter eligibility requirements, such as demanding secondary education for self-employment support, have sharply reduced Roma participation. The pattern is the same everywhere: the programmes most likely to lead to stable employment are the least accessible to those who need them most.

 

Part of the problem is that employers themselves are reluctant to take the risk. Hiring someone without formal qualifications, without previous registered employment, or without references is seen as uncertain and costly. That is exactly why reskilling and training programmes should exist. But in many countries, these programmes are only accessible through employers. A worker who wants to retrain often cannot access support independently. And an employer who is already hesitant to hire an unqualified worker is unlikely to initiate the process.

 

The result is paralysis. Employers wait for "ready" workers who do not exist. Excluded workers wait for opportunities they cannot access. Public money sits unused in between.

 

This paralysis carries a measurable economic cost. Closing the Roma employment gap could generate up to two billion euros in additional productivity across the region each year, alongside hundreds of millions in fiscal gains. At a time when governments are searching for growth, this should not be treated as a minority issue or a social policy topic. It is an economic issue.

 

Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama has warned that "the only option for us to have economic growth leading to sustainable employment and welfare is to adapt to a more competitive model." He is right, but competitiveness means little if the policies meant to deliver it remain disconnected from daily reality. More people will not enter the workforce because a work plan was agreed in Berlin. They will enter it when childcare is affordable, when informal work is no longer the safer bet, and when a job in their own country is worth staying for.

 

If programmes require qualifications unemployed people do not have, they will fail. If self-employment schemes require guarantors, business histories, or upfront capital, they will exclude the people trying hardest to formalize their work. If retraining programmes are only accessible through employers, workers willing to reskill on their own will remain stuck outside the system.

 

The Berlin Process has now created a structure to coordinate employment policy across the region. That matters. But unless governments use it to fundamentally rethink how programmes operate — who qualifies, who participates, and who gets hired — the result will be familiar: well-written plans, underused budgets, and unchanged outcomes.

 

The Western Balkans does not have a labour shortage. The region has a system that fails to connect people to work. Ministers have signed the Work Plan. The real test is simple: do more people, including Roma, end up in real jobs?

 

Neda Korunovska is Vice President for Analytics and Results at the Roma Foundation for Europe, a Brussels-based foundation working to strengthen Roma agency and build a resilient Europe.