The Challenges and Opportunities for Employment of Marginalized Groups by Social Enterprises

Donor: Regional Research Promotion Programme
Duration: August 2014 – January 2016

This project is a result of collaborative research work of five partner organizations: “Reactor – Research in action”, “Konekt” and “Public” from Macedonia, “Partners Albania” from Albania and “Center for peace and tolerance” from Kosovo. The aim of the research is to understand the perceived challenges and opportunities for employment of marginalized groups by social enterprise (SE) through mapping the social enterprise models in Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo. Our motivation is the existing evidence from other countries that in addition to contributing to economic growth, social enterprises offer an opportunity for employing vulnerable and marginalized groups.

The results of this study will help with improvement of the national policies on social enterprises and ensure that they are framed in a way that emphasizes the inclusion and employment of the most marginalized and vulnerable, providing further information on how to engage the vulnerable groups to make the transfer from welfare recipients to active part of the labour market. Additionally, this research contributes to the increased knowledge of social economy in the region, SEs as agents of change and their ways of operating in different environment.