On 25 of May within the framework of the project “Place To Grow: Child Friendly Municipality”, a local conference on the topic “Veles – Child-friendly municipality” was held at Europe House Veles.
At the conference, representatives of local self-government, educational institutions, kindergartens, and public institutions debated issues related to encouraging children’s participation in planning and decision-making.
In his introductory speech, the president and founder of the first children’s embassy in the world, Draghi Zmijanac emphasized the need to detect the real needs and problems of children in the local community and their constructive solution in cooperation with the relevant institutions. The director of Family and Child Care Centre, Kristina Vasilevska, presented her introductory speech the ongoing and planned activities for the development of the concept “Child-friendly cities”.
The Mayor of Veles Municipality, Marko Kolev, pointed out that the municipality is open and responsive to all the needs and problems of children and young people in the city, through continuous and direct communication with them:
“The Municipality of Veles in the past two and a half years really seriously and dedicatedly invested in building infrastructure intended for the psychophysical and social development of children. The focus was to improve the conditions in schools and kindergartens, reconstruction and building a large number of children’s playgrounds and sports grounds in the city, and the rural areas as well, green areas for rest and recreation were improved. After a long time, we devoted ourselves to increasing the content and activities for children – numerous theatre performances, festivals, workshops and competitions on current topics, sports games, children’s programs within existing and newly created festivals, etc. were organized. Not only children and young people could enjoy the rich program, but they were also participants and creators. What I am especially proud of is the regular communication that we have with them every day by organizing visits and other events, through which the children get to know the public activities of the Municipality (Mayor, Council, fire department) and have space to express their opinions, needs and ideas. This is the only way we can build healthy generation and the child friendly city” Kolev said.
The representatives of Kisela Voda Municipality spoke about the possibility of promoting inter-municipal cooperation and exchange of ideas, implementation of joint projects and inter-sectoral networking in the direction of creating a municipality based on children’s standards, as well as for continuous investment in raising the quality of the educational process, improvement of conditions in schools and kindergartens and support of children from families in social risk. Particular emphasis was placed on organizing forms and the opportunity for children to make decisions on local level.
More panellists spoke at the conference in several sessions. Topics covered were from the area: building of children’s rights in modern local self-government, the role and involvement of children and young people in local self-government and their activities in the Youth Centre of Veles, the role of educational institutions and the inclusion of children with disabilities. At the conference, they also spoke about the challenges in solving children’s rights, youth violence and discrimination of children’s rights.
Special emphasis on children’s rights was given by Mihail Zdravkovski, – student advocate at OOU “Blaze Koneski” and Izabela Dimkov, President of the school parliament at OOU “Vasil Glavinov”. They focused on children’s rights, the role of municipalities in their development, and their expectations.
After the conference, municipal panels were constituted with aim to provide structured and focused work related to children’s rights and the adopting of local strategic plans, while also enabling the development of a strategic plan for the Municipality of Veles in order to promote children’s rights and their inclusion in local planning.
The municipality of Veles is one of the five municipalities that are involved in the project “Place to grow: Child friendly municipalities”, which is implemented by the First Children’s Embassy Megjashi and Family and Child Care Centre-KMOP Skopje, which is financed by the European Union.