Beyond Barriers Association held on 15 October 2018, the second National Forum on Youth Employment about Youth Entrepreneurship development in Albania, part of the Web4YES project. The meeting brought together 14 actors from the central and local governmental institutions, Union of Syndicates, CSO-s working with youth employment, international organizations, youth networks, and representatives of career centers of private universities.

The aim of the second meeting of the Forum was to consult the two recent draft reports with focus in youth entrepreneurship, and create concrete recommendations from main actors involved. National Reports on “Enabling Environment for Youth Entrepreneurship” and “Entrepreneurial Learning” were introduced and produced a lot of discussion and recommendations from the participants of this meeting.

Main discussion was held around the main challenges the YE faces nowadays in Albania. The following key point were discussed.

1. Lack of engagement of young people in the entrepreneurship field
2. Legal infrastructure and unfavorable loan system become a barrier for young people
3. Lack of national financial support for youth entrepreneurs
4. Lack of education in mass population about entrepreneurship mind set
5. Youth are not taught to take risk in a unstable economy, a cultural factor is also huge effect
6. Family and society culture towards the topic becomes a pull factor at most cases
7. Confusion or not understanding what is a typical/traditional form of business and what is a youth enterprise 
8. CSO projects that support entrepreneurs are not enough to create the enabling environment
9. Lack of expertise from NES offisec to support youth becomes a barrier

After these discussions a setof concree reccommendations was craeted for both reports. Main focus was put into entrepreneurial learning and find ways and concrete tools how to boost it and encourage the young people to learn about entrepreneurship and cuture of taking risks.

Also, development and better coooperation among the public-private sector is a must in order to improve the policies and increse implementation of the current ones. The triple helix approach must be properly integrated in the ppolicy agenda and more incentives for its applicability is a need. It s  true that Albania has minimised the registration procedure, days and cost for entreprises by digitalising the online syste with   the one-stop-shop and this is a very good step towards an enabling environment. Though there is still a lot of work to do in policy implementation, monitoring and evaluation, funds support and continues education in different levels.