Today many representatives of CSOs, centers for social work, local governments and institutions of social and child protection attended the round table entitled “Mapping the services of social protection in Montenegro“. Round table is organised within the project „Mapping the alternative social services in Montenegro“, which is still ongoing. The project is supported by the Commission for allocation of part of revenues from the games of chance.
The overall goal of this project is to enhance development and availability of community based services, as services available in at least restrictive environment. The research tackled the issue of development and availability of these services, which the Law on Social and Child protection divides into: services of supporting life in community, socially-educative and advisory- therapeutic services and services of accommodation (in shelter). Different actors from public and private sectors are potential providers of all these services.
The specific objectives of the research are:
- To establish the evidence of the community based services in all local governments
- To determine the structure of services and its providers in all local governments
- To make the catalog (map) of community based services and its providers for all local governments (available to the public)
- To provide recommendations aiming at re-directing future activities of all relevant social actors at the local and national level in order to improve development and availability of community based services of social protection.
Key findings of the research:
- 284 services of social protection delivered by 175 different providers for 27 587 beneficiaries are available in Montenegro;
- The most available services are socially/educative and advisory/therapeutic, and the least developed is the service of shelter;
- Services are mainly initiated and developed through projects of non-governmental organizations and are thus unsustainable, suggesting the need for continuous funding of social services at the national and local levels;
- The funding of social services will remain a permanent problem if the Ministry of Labor and Social Care does not provide funds for increasing availability and sustainability of these services. Also, local governments should regularly allocate funds for financing of social services and enable all interested actors to have an insight intothe funds planned and distributed through the local budgets. This will also contribute to the transparency of thelocal public expenditure in the field of social protection;
- Local governments deliver only 2 services as direct providers. Their role is namely restricted to coordination and management of social services;
- Many social actors, especially centers for social welfare and local governments still do not make a difference between social services and cash benefits, altough these are different rights. Hence, there is a need for further training of social actors about the efficient implementation of the Law on Social and Child Protection.
The representatives of German Ministry of Finance Ms. Ingrid Roeder and Mr. Oliver Klabunde, in charge of the European Union enlargement and bilateral relations with candidate countries for the accession to the EU, visited Institute Alternative today. Mr. Olaf Poeschke, Deputy Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Montenegro, attended the meeting as well.