Since 2013, 150,000 Young People Have Left Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Who Knows How Many More

Young people are leaving! Thousands of people leave every year... Entire families are leaving us... These are just some of the headlines we read daily in newspapers and on portals...

In the last two years alone, 80,000 people, mostly young, have left Bosnia and Herzegovina, a radio announcer tells us with a worried voice...

Tomorrow is August 12 – International Youth Day.

The United Nations (UN) declared August 12 as International Youth Day in 1999, and it has been celebrated every year since to promote youth activism and recognize the efforts and actions of young people worldwide that contribute to positive changes, development, and economic benefits for communities and society at large.

Last year, we celebrated it without 150,000 young people who, according to the Analysis of the Situation and Needs of Youth in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, conducted by the Institute for Youth Development KULT, had left Bosnia and Herzegovina from the end of the war until 2013.

How many more have left?

We don't know, because our country does not have this data. There are no official figures on the number of departures from any of the competent institutions, and we only deal with numbers based on data from certain non-governmental organizations and sporadic statements from "concerned" officials.

Where are the policies for retaining young people? Where are the strategies? Where is the implementation of the Law on Youth?

Is twenty-something years of neglect of young people, those on whom the world rests, still not enough? Too little? Will we wait another twenty years before we stop just worrying and do nothing?

There are no state-level documents with guidelines for creating a better living environment in BiH. In the Federation of BiH, the adoption of the Youth Strategy has been awaited for over a year, while RS represents a slightly brighter spot in this regard. The youth policy of RS is adopted continuously, for the third time.

Young people are dissatisfied, authorities are negligent.

There is no political will to prevent young people from leaving, no programs to keep them, not even empty promises that things will get better.

That Bosnia and Herzegovina will offer what the European Union, whose accession we strive for so much, offers; that young people will have a perspective and that their faith in a better tomorrow will be restored. That meetings at employment bureaus will not be the most common way of maintaining contacts, and queues in front of embassies a place of dreams and hopes.

One of the deputies in the National Assembly of RS, concerned about the declining number of students in primary schools, warns that this BiH entity loses 20,000 inhabitants every year.

In the Sarajevo Canton, from 2013 to 2015, the number of students enrolled in secondary schools decreased by 23%, while in the 2016/17 school year, the Zenica-Doboj Canton recorded the lowest number of children enrolled in the first grade of primary school in the past 5 years.

So, land of the old, happy Youth Day. A land that does not need its born, nor those who will give birth. A land for which the Law on Youth only serves to let us know that they are those aged 15 to 30 and who are most fiercely discussed when it is determined whether they legally or illegally and through which agency went to Germany, Switzerland, Sweden... while about 60% of them are still unemployed, while they are not satisfied with education, healthcare...

A land from which, according to the Institute's data, four out of five young people would leave immediately.

(KULT)