Director of Moldova's Centru Regional Development Agency willing beneficial economic projects for people's living standards

Interview given exclusively with the MOLDPRES State News Agency by Director of the Centru (Central) Regional Development Agency Viorel Jardan.  

MOLDPRES: The 2018 year will go down in history as a period of far-reaching reforms and big and important projects. Can you affirm this also in the context of the region you manage?  

Viorel Jardan: We cannot work beyond reforms at all and to get to these necessary and nice achievements, joint work is needed. Yet, for the changes for the better to be really felt by people, a certain period of consolidating the progress is still necessary. At the level of the Centru region, the projects which are already outlined distinguish themselves and which make the residents regain their trust in the state’s institutions, in the development partners and in the rational use of money, no matter its source.  

M.: To what extent have you managed to fulfill the plans set in early 2018? În ce măsură ați reușit să realizați planurile propuse la începutul anului 2018?

V.J.: The priority sectors for us in the regional development are residents’ provision with water and sanitation, improving the infrastructure of local and regional roads, improving the environmental factors through the management of solid waste, energy optimization of public buildings, development of the business support infrastructure and enhancing the tourism activity. More than 80,000 citizens expect from us changes in the aforementioned fields.  

Last year, networks of water and sanitation were constructed and made available for use, roads were built and restored, tourism objects were arranged. It is clear that the expectations of citizens and local public administration from the region are higher. Or, therefore, an important task for the Agency is to attract external resources for the implementation of those projects from the Regional Operational Plan which could not be covered by the National Regional Development Fund (FNDR). In 2018, with the support of the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), we initiated the implementation from European sources of six projects, worked out as a result of a comprehensive process of regional sectoral planning. This is a great achievement for us, as well as a unique experience in the implementation of European funds.     

We have a lot of goals and, obviously, we did not manage to carry out all of them last year, but we will continue in 2019. We do not slow down, as we have got involved into a continuous process, through which we want to enforce the regional policy fairly and with appropriate results.  

M.: Name the main three reasons which, in your opinion, hinder the reforms and development in the region you represent.   

V.J.: Several aspects of the hindrances in the implementation of reforms in the region show themselves through the lack of wish of public administration from both levels to associate. This represents a real challenge for us. Unfortunately, the egocentrism and self-pride of some people, showed by the wish to make themselves conspicuous, to impose their own person, hinder actions with sustainable and feasible impact. Also, the passive involvement of some local civil servants makes impossible the attraction of new financings or projects and the phenomenon of lack of investors appears in this way. Another decisive detail continues to be the organizational form of the local public administration which inevitably needs reformation.  

M.: Name details giving safety that the economic situation in the region will be improved.

V.J.: By all our activities, we try to raise the region’s economy to a higher level. We see from statistics data on the Centru region an acute lack of qualified labour force and a low level of arrangement and endowment of lands and the basic economic infrastructure.

The agriculture and food industry, forestry and forest exploitation, manufacturing of textile products, production of basic pharmaceutical goods and pharmaceutical preparations, etc. are developed in the Centru region. We facilitate for the active agents from the region the participation in regional and national events, meetings with foreign partners; we place information and publicize the events which contribute to the promotion and turning to good account of the region’s economic and investment potential.    

To back the economic development of the Centru Development Region, a regional sectoral programme in the sector of business support infrastructure was elaborated and approved in 2017. Based on this, specialists of the agency, as well as the authorities from the region develop projects and promote them for financing. Already in 2018, we managed to persuade partners from Sweden to invest in our region through implementing the project, Creating new business opportunities through enhanced knowledge about the development of business based on the environmental protection. We hope that this will be a small impetus for boosting the economy in the region.     

At the same time, during 2018, the concept of public policy on urban development centres was worked out. Once the concept approved, we want to put emphasis on the creation of poles of growth in the region and, at the same time, on the regeneration of degraded and abandoned urban spaces, as well as their preparation for new economic, social and entertainment activities.   

M.: Please, quickly assess the weak and strong points of your region.

V.J.: Obviously, the strong point of the region is the presence of ADR Centru here. During nine years of work, the Agency has become an important actor in the carrying out of the regional policy, strengthened its capacities and competences in the major activity sectors – planning, projects’ implementation, capacities’ development, etc. – with possibility to become a mobilizing factor and coordinator of the relations between diverse actors regionally. At the same time, I would like a more active involvement of the members of the Regional Development Board – a regional forum, which, although with a good representation of public and private sectors, does not manage to well enough harmonize the interests of the actors involved. Presently, the Board is formal and remains a clumsy structure from the operational viewpoint, which puts problems of making the quorum. Nevertheless, we try to find, in this case too, a format which might give more efficiency to the programmes and projects we commit to carry out.     

Speaking about the physical and geographical position of the region, I would mention the fact that our action area is around the Moldovan capital and this provides us numerous opportunities to have access to a developed sales market, as well as to a big diversity of public services. In the western part of the region, we have the neighbourghood with Romania, which provides openings towards cooperation relations with EU member countries, as well as possibilities of economic and administrative collaboration.  

Besides all this, we have also a unique tourist potential, as compared to the other regions. Yet, the present tourism units are not adjusted to the modern standards (from the viewpoint of visibility, services’ quality, organizational capacity, endowment with resources, of infrastructure), which determines a slow development of tourism and which prompts us to make interventions in this sector.  

M.: Which are the foremost priorities for the region in 2019?

V.J.: Those six intervention fields on which the work of ADR Centru is focused remain priority for the next period. We are on the eve of scheduling and we are to focus on the assessment of what we have carried out and see how we set our priorities and how we plan our activities in the next regional strategy. At the same time, in 2019, we plan to focus the soft and hard investments for the water and sanitation supply sector. Especially as, proceeding from the results of a study in the concerned sector, worked out by ADR Centru in 2018, the situation in the concerned field leaves to be desired. In this respect, we plan to implement projects financed both with FNDR sources and from external sources (EU, KFW, Slovak Aid).       

Obviously, for the long run, we want to implement projects which would contribute to unchaining the economic activities with beneficial effect on the people’s living standards and the investments made should help edify a modern region.    

M.: Thank you for the interview given and we wish you great success!