Republic of Moldova

The Prague Process Action Plan 2023-2027 was adopted at the Fourth Prague Process Ministerial Conference, held by the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU on 24-25 October in Prague. The Action Plan sets 53 concrete actions within the six priority areas for cooperation:

Together with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNDP is supporting eleven countries—Bangladesh, Ecuador, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, the Philippines, Serbia, Senegal and Tunisia, to continue to address the plight of migrants and their host communities by supporting national and local governments to mainstream migration into development plans.

The Crisis Communication Plan in the field of irregular migration was devised with the participation of a wide range of governmental actors and institutions at local and central levels.

The Republic of Moldova gives migrants the option to buy into national insurance schemes. Both migrants and refugees benefit from medical services through the mandatory health insurance system and also benefit from preventive and disease prevention services (e.g. immunization, communication/information, screening, prophylactic treatment for infectious diseases).

The PARE 1+1 Programme for Attracting  Remittances into the Economy, launched in 2010, offers funding to complement migrants’ financial resources and provides entrepreneurial training to migrants and their relatives for business development. The Programme also provides beneficiaries with information on the existing business opportunities. For this purpose, diaspora networks act as important information dissemination channels thus raising awareness on available investment opportunities in Moldova.

Results:

Migration is a global phenomenon affecting all countries worldwide and its effective governance needs global partnerships. It is within this context that, since 2011, IOM and UNDP have been implementing a Joint Global Programme on Mainstreaming Migration (MM) into National Development Strategies with funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. 

The main push factors for Moldovans migration are of economic nature, mainly poverty, lack of employment opportunities and low salaries.  The main countries of destination are Russia (over 40 per cent) and Italy (over 25 per cent). Other preferred destination countries are also: The United Kingdom, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Ukraine, Turkey, Spain and others.   

Jointly implemented with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the project involves the development of a policy-benchmarking framework to assess the extent to which national migration policies facilitate orderly, safe and well managed migration, as laid out in SDG Target 10.7.

The Bureau of Migration and Asylum (BMA) is a subdivision of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA), which main attribution is control of immigration process in Moldova. The IOM collaboration with the BMA stared back in 2000s, when BMA was subordinated to the Government. The BMA underwent a series of reforms, which led to restructuring of its main attributions and subordination to the MIA.  The IOM supported BMA during this process, especially in the readmission domain and improving the irregular migrants’ conditions of stay in the Migrant Accommodation Center of the BMA.

The mobility partnerships are the most complete framework for bilateral cooperation between the EU and its partners, based on mutual offers of commitments and project initiatives covering mobility, migration and asylum issues, within the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM). Helping citizens to move around Europe in a secure environment is a key component of the Eastern Partnership, which promotes the mobility of the citizens of the EU Eastern partner countries through visa facilitation agreements, and provides rules for managing the return of irregular migrant