The EU Pact for Skills: How to engage?
EVPA encourages those in the impact community active in the area of education and skills to sign up to the Charter of the EU Pact for Skills. This will enable you to be well positioned to benefit from the increasing amount of EU support in this area and to engage in innovative (cross-sectoral) partnerships, public-private-collaboration and co-investment.
The European Skills Agenda’s top priority is to reskill and upskill people so that everyone can benefit from the green and digital transition of Europe. The Pact for Skills is a key building block of this agenda. It aims to mobilise investment flowing into upskilling and reskilling the working-age population, engage all stakeholders, and facilitate cooperation in the skills and education sector. Investors for impact active in this area can therefore play an important role in this joint effort to maximise the impact of skills investment.
The Charter of the Pact for Skills sets out a number of key principles which signatories pledge to respect and uphold:
- Promoting a culture of lifelong learning for all
- Building strong skills partnerships
- Monitoring skills supply/demand and anticipating skills needs
- Working against discrimination and for gender equality and equal opportunities
Signatories are also encouraged to translate their engagement into concrete commitments which contribute to upskilling and reskilling people. You can sign the Charter here.
EVPA signed the Charter and issues guidance to the impact community on their engagement with the Pact for Skills and dedicated EU support services. For instance, we published a policy brief and organised a webinar on the Pact and EU funding programmes relating to education and skills.
EVPA and Social Economy Europe lead the focus group established by the European Commission to map the skills needs of the Social & Proximity Economy, set KPIs to track the impact of the Pact for Skills, and seek ways to stimulate collaboration. In this way, we will ensure that the principles outlined in the Pact are widely applied in the social economy. The group is drafting a declaration on its commitments and KPIs to achieve these goals with the aim to present this declaration at the social economy summit in Strasbourg in February 2022.
For more information about the EVPA’s work on the Pact for Skills, contact our Senior Policy and EU Partnerships Manager, Bianca Polidoro: bpolidoro@evpa.ngo