Late December saw the final meeting of the working group on social entrepreneurship development in Belarus. In late 2016, the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection entrusted the Research Institute of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Republic of Belarus with the task to conduct a survey on “The need for and the degree of legislative regulation of the sphere of social entrepreneurship in the Republic of Belarus”. In April 2017, the Research Institute of the Ministry of Labour and Social protection, with support from the Support Programme of Belarus of the Federal Government of Germany and ODB Brussels, came forward with an initiative to create a working group to help organize this survey. Throughout the year, the working group had 5 meetings, the last of which happened on December 19, 2017.
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| Hanna Zakreuskaya, representative of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Republic of Belarus, Aksana Yelova, “Social Sphere” coordinator of the Support Programme of Belarus of the Federal Government of Germany, and Maksim Padbiarozkin, coordinator of ODB Brussels’ social entrepreneurship development programme |
The meeting on December 19 brought together twenty people who represented social enterprises from different cities of Belarus. Aksana Yelova, “Social Sphere” coordinator of the Support Programme of Belarus of the Federal Government of Germany, was the first to speak during the meeting of the working group. “The Support Programme provided extensive assistance in gathering information about the developments in social entrepreneurship in Belarus, as well as existing problems and development prospects”.
Hanna Zakreuskaya, representative of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Republic of Belarus, presented the results of the survey to the working group. She shared the main conclusions made by the staff of the Research Institute in the survey and asked everyone for comments on certain items, as they still have to report on the results of the survey to the customer. “This survey was an investigative one for the Research Institute of the Ministry of Labour, as we never had the goal to develop a specific document. However, we had the goal to study social entrepreneurship in Belarus, determine its status, degree and importance, as well as possible ways of regulating it”.
In the course of the survey, the specialists studied how the institute of the social entrepreneurship works in foreign countries and learned about their regulatory experience. They have also organized a large-scale survey and studied the existing practice of social entrepreneurship in our country. These results and the general conclusions of the survey were presented in the end-of-year final report to the customer, the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection. “We have also studied a wide range of legislative acts that, directly or indirectly, regulate the sphere of social entrepreneurship in Belarus. It can already be said that the survey helped to understand this concept, make specific conclusions and develop conceptual approaches to regulating social entrepreneurship in our country. All this information will be presented to the customer”.
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| Meeting of the working group on development of social entrepreneurship in Belarus 19.12.2017, Minsk |
In the final part of her presentation, Hanna reiterated that the survey is an investigative one, which did not cover suggestions for specific regulations but instead spoke about approaches and general regulation measures. Maksim Padbiarozkin, coordinator of ODB Brussels’ social entrepreneurship development programme, stressed that the staff of the Institute did a lot of work and this had been the most large-scale survey of social entrepreneurship in our country so far.
Text and photo by: Valeriya Nikalaichyk
With financial support from the European Union