By receiving a non-refundable amount of 999,512 kuna from the European Social Fund, LAG Vallis Colapis from Ozalj, in partnership with LAG Frankopan from Ogulin, the Women’s Group Karlovac-Korak, the company HR-Koncept from Nedelišće, and with the support of Karlovac County and the City of Karlovac, has presented the program ‘Employment through a Modern Approach to the Offer of Agricultural Products’, which started on June 1 and will conclude at the end of November 2019.
This is a good example of drawing funds from the European Social Fund, and a prerequisite for this is the fact that LAGs Vallis Colapis and Frankopan are accredited by the Ministry of Agriculture for implementing a decentralized financing model through Measure 19 of the Rural Development Program.
Milan Medić LAG Vallis Colapis; photo: Mladen Volarić/Lider
Moreover, the activities that will be initiated in this project with ESF funds will be supplemented by direct support that the LAGs will provide to end users from the Rural Development Program, said Milan Medić, head of LAG Vallis Colapis.
Martina Marušić Britvec, project manager, stated that the goal of the project is to find, motivate, and educate at least 50 individuals to start their own agricultural production and connect them with the market, with the target group being unemployed individuals in rural areas, with a special emphasis on youth, women, and all unemployed individuals over 50 years of age.
Martina Marušić Britvec; photo: Mladen Volarić/Lider
LAG Vallis Colapis, led by Milan Medić, covers the northern half of Karlovac County and Zagreb County, while LAG Frankopan, under the leadership of Valentina Magdić, covers the southern part of Karlovac County and part of Lika-Senj County.
As part of the project, six employment clubs will be established in September, with the help of the Women’s Group ‘Karlovac-Korak’, and with the support of branches of the Croatian Employment Service, which will operate in Duga Resa, Ozalj, Ogulin, Slunj, Otočac, and Pisarovina.
In these clubs, unemployed individuals, who may already be engaged in agriculture or have the conditions and potential for this activity, will be offered and enabled education and acquisition of basic entrepreneurial skills so that they can connect with companies through which they can market their products by establishing family farms or as self-employed individuals.
photo: Mladen Volarić/Lider
In this segment, the role of the company HR-Koncept is crucial, whose owner Hrvoje Kolman launched the web portals Finoteka.com and FinotekaDostava back in 2008, which have already connected thousands of agricultural producers from across Croatia with a network of buyers, and the system operates through prompt direct delivery of agricultural products to the doorstep of the customer, and in this marketing of exclusively Croatian agricultural products, a step has already been made towards exports to Slovenia and Austria.
In the first phase of work, potential users of this program, Kolman said, will be introduced to the food market and the entire related issues, along with advice on how to solve problems, in the second phase, the users themselves should crystallize the idea of what they could specifically produce and what their potentials are, whether it is vegetable cultivation or permanent crops, how large the family is, what the location and land are like.
– In the third phase, discussions should already take place with users who have made decisions on what they will focus on, and we would professionally train them, for example, on how to properly package products for delivery to the customer, as this is very important in this type of business, how to present themselves online for market entry, and we will assist them with our rich database of producers and buyers, thus enabling them access to the food market from the start, Kolman said.
