Accelerating North Macedonia’s digitalisation of employment and labour data to improve policy making

The collection and application of data has seen extensive leaps in recent years, not least within policy making. This trend has taken place in North Macedonia too, highlighting the need to ensure quality and compatibility of the data used by different governmental agencies. This was the goal of the recently ended two-year ‘Improving the Quality of Data and Strengthening Policy Making’ project that NIRAS implemented in partnership with Ramboll Denmark A/S.

Designed to strengthen sector policy making and support the implementation of the country’s national employment, education, training and social inclusion strategies, the project contributes to the efforts to reduce the high rate of unemployment and skills mismatch , increase labour market participation ‒ particularly among young people and women ‒ improve access to quality education and training, and establish a modern and flexible social protection system.

Despite its implementation in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the project ran smoothly. NIRAS’s project manager, Borivoj Badrjica, emphasises the benefit of an all-local project team based in Skopje, meaning that no travel was necessary. “Luckily, before COVID hit Europe, we managed to have meetings with the ministries of education, labour and social policies, the State Statistical Office, and the national Employment Service Agency and complete the Inception phase,” he says.

Securing the legal basis for the IT project while building capacity

Data management and quality lay at the heart of the project. The team was comprised of four national experts and a local subcontractor Inteligenta who supported the IT component while two international consultants were brought onboard in the second phase of the project. They had to ensure data gathering, data management, data verification process, and later use of data for forecasting and interoperability between all the ministries and relevant institutions which were the project’s primary beneficiaries.  “Like every project, we started with an analysis of data collection processes – we monitored the situation. We then made sure the new system that was developed would be fully functional because there were multiple information systems being run by the Ministry of Education and Science. In parallel to this, there were also systems used by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, and the Employment Service Agency. The idea behind project was thus to integrate data on education into a single database, connect the systems of the three beneficiary institutions by designing and deploying web services and develop two BI systems so that, when they use the data in the decision making processes, we have ensured the data is correct, compatible, consistent and accurate,” says Dejan Zlatkovski, a national expert who worked with the IT component of the project.