Why do so few of Moldova's unemployed ask the state for help?

Jasmin Delev is exactly the kind of person Moldova's National Employment Agency (ANOFM) exists to help. She is 23, she came home this summer with an audiovisual design degree from the Netherlands, and she has been looking for work. She has never once considered registering.

Instead she freelances, piecing together video and design projects, some months earning well, others earning nothing. “I didn't spend four years studying art and design in a liberal European country with a rich cultural scene just to come back to Moldova and do social media for a trucking company,” she said. Delev quickly added that “There is nothing wrong with those jobs, but I want work that actually uses my creative and intellectual skills.” She did not think the state could help her.

Jasmin is not an exception.

Very few Moldovans use the state's help finding work. In the second quarter of 2026, 67,600 people were officially unemployed, a rate of 7.3 per cent according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Yet agency figures show that only 6,208 people were registered as unemployed with ANOFM at the start of July, a small fraction of those the state itself counts as out of work.

“The statistics made us think that something was not quite right,” said Aet Trei, an Estonian expert and consultant in employment services.

In a country where nearly half of the population has left in the past 30 years, every third company was short of staff in 2023, according to a survey by ANOFM. It found that around 11,000 vacancies employers could not be filled that year. The need to bring jobseekers closer to employers is clear.

The gaps are wide.

To bridge them and find out what was missing, Estonian experts, funded by the Estonian Centre for International Development (ESTDEV), came to support and train Moldova’s employment experts this year. Two years earlier, they had similarly helped to reform the State Employment Service of Ukraine.

“The answer lies in data and digitalization,” concluded the project manager Trei, who led the six months of training for the employees of ANOFM. Around 15 Estonian experts led eight training days on performance management, digital systems and counselling. “Our message was: everything you want to change, you must measure. For this you have to use smart digital and AI tools.” The jobseekers and employers are the clients, she emphasized, and their needs should be at the centre of all processes.

But in Moldova, many databases are still built on old-fashioned Excel files with incoherent data.

“The employment agency’s consultants should be the experts who understand what is happening across the fields and regions,” Trei said. “They should be able to visualize the data to support the jobseekers and employers.”

In Estonia, a publicly available dashboard was created for this purpose.

“I entered a laboratory in Estonia”

As part of the programme, a visit to the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund was included.

When Vadim Ceban, head of IT at ANOFM, walked into a career guidance centre in Estonia, his first thought was that he had entered a laboratory. Digital tools help people test their skills and explore possible careers, while technology takes over routine work so counsellors could focus more on people. “Digitalization does not mean simply installing software,” Ceban said. “It means changing the mindset, simplifying internal processes and continuously training staff.”

Some of that thinking is now written into Moldovan policy. In July 2026, the country’s parliament passed amendments to employment law, aligned with EU rules, that let a registered jobseeker keep their unemployment benefit for up to three months while searching for work in an EU country, a change that takes effect this autumn.

Ceban said ideas from the Estonian training were also written directly into ANOFM's technical specifications for its own new digital system. “Simply moving a bureaucratic process onto a screen does not help,” he said. “First it has to be redesigned and simplified, and only then automated.”

For Ceban, the goal is not to replace counsellors but to free them from routine work. In Estonia, he said, “the system works instead of people” on many repetitive tasks, leaving staff with more time to talk to clients and guide them.

Estonia has faced a similar problem. Its employment service is only about 25 years old and has gone through repeated reforms. Trei recalled that even the word “unemployment” once carried a stigma and people were not used to turning to the service for help. Over time, the institution became a partner for finding a first job, changing careers or returning to work.

Karolin Kõrreveski, head of International Relations at the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund, described a workability reform in Estonia that stopped looking only at a person’s medical diagnosis and asked instead what that individual could still do.

Trei is careful not to present Estonia as a finished model. “Moldova should not copy Estonia one to one,” she said. Estonia itself is now asking whether its own employment service tried to do too much, running programmes “for everyone” instead of focusing on those who need the most support, a mistake she hopes Moldova can skip.

For Estonia, Moldova is also a test of whether lessons from its own relatively recent reforms can be adapted to another country preparing for EU membership.

Moldova is now trying to adapt that experience while rebuilding the systems behind it: matching jobseekers to work by their actual skills, helping young people choose what to study based on what employers need, and giving employers a faster way to find the right person.

Learning from Estonia on the way to the EU

The programme fits into Moldova’s preparations for EU accession. The project framework explicitly links the work to Chapter 19 of the EU acquis on social policy and employment: a modern employment service is expected not only to register unemployment, but to help people enter and remain in the labour market.

For Trei, digitalization is also about the jobseeker's own experience of the state. “If the state has already asked me for information in one place,” she said, “why should I have to provide it again somewhere else from scratch?” It is a small frustration, but one that shapes whether people bother engaging with public institutions at all.

Making the service easier to approach

Some lessons are already having an effect on Moldova’s new system. ANOFM wants to regularly ask jobseekers and employers whether its services actually help them, test the system with at least 50 local staff in 2027, and automate it by 2028.

“We need to find time for the citizens, to listen and to think creatively about the most suitable solution for that person,” said Raisa Dogaru, director of ANOFM. That takes more than better software. It takes more staff: ANOFM has 245 employees, compared with more than 900 in Estonia despite its smaller population. People facing disability, long-term unemployment or the shame of losing a job often need time with a counsellor, not just a digital form.

“You have to listen to every person who comes to us,” Dogaru said.

Trei said she hopes Moldovans will increasingly see ANOFM “as a partner” where they can discuss a first job, a career change or what to do after losing work.

“If I start to feel like I am suffocating, I will leave for Romania, where the situation is a little better and the environment feels a little like home,” Jasmin said. She softly added the words “A little”.

Marian Männi is an Estonian investigative, feature and data journalist.

Iurie Gandrabura is a Moldovan journalist.