FEAD;
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The European Commission has confirmed that it has granted more than €700 million to five Operational Programmes (OP) of the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD) in Spain and Luxembourg to help with crisis response and repair in the framework of REACT-EU.
The ESF programme for Madrid will be topped up with €534 million to support education by paying for additional staff and teacher training. The fresh funds will help young people gain better skills and find jobs, and will guide people in vulnerable situations towards employment. €76 million to the ESF OP Extremadura will support the self-employed in maintaining and creating new jobs. The funds will also provide incentives to hire permanent staff or convert temporary contracts into permanent ones. Moreover, the funding will support vocational education and training programmes.
The ESF OP for Galicia will receive an additional €80 million in 2021 to support the self-employed and micro-enterprises affected by the crisis. It will also help small businesses hire so-called ‘relief workers’ to ease the transition, also in terms of knowledge, between people retiring and incoming workers. The funds will also be invested in boosting female employment and support people with particular vulnerabilities to get access to social services, education and jobs. Finally, the funds will allow the Galician employment service to improve its service capacity through a new tool, which uses big data and artificial intelligence to anticipate skills needs and, for instance, plan training offers. The ESF OP for Melilla will receive an additional €11 million to support employment and self-employment and help unemployed people gain better skills.
In addition, in Luxembourg, the resources of the national programme of the FEAD will be increased by €460,000 to provide food aid and basic material assistance to the most deprived households. The extra funds will help meet the increased needs for food support due to the socio-economic impact of the pandemic. Between 2014 and 2020, the FEAD in Luxembourg supported 71,640 beneficiaries with an envelope already incurred of some €3.5 million. The additional REACT EU allocation aims to address possible new requests entailed by the social consequences of the pandemic.
REACT-EU is part of NextGenerationEU and provides €50.6 billion additional funding (in current prices) over the course of 2021 and 2022 to Cohesion policy programmes.
