The project “Vouchers for the provision of flexible child-minders service to workers with nonstandard work schedules” was implemented with the support of EU’s employment and social innovation programme (EaSI PROGRESS) for the period 2014.-2020
Objective of the project was to support flexible childcare services for children with parents who work non-standard hours, and develop long term model to subsidise this service, thus promoting employment of the parents and reconciliation of work and family life.
The main objectives of the project were:
- To find optimum approach for provision of childcare services for the employees with non-standard hours;
- To find optimum financial mechanism with involvement of private and public sector;
- To establish long term functional model to subsidise and develop flexible childcare services.
Activities implemented under the project:
- Provision of experimental childcare services for children of 150 employees within the selected companies for the period of 10 months;
- 7 regional seminars in Jelgava, Riga and Valmiera to ensure project communication, selection of companies and harmonisation of project activities;
- Consultations provided by the Co-corporate Sustainability and Responsibility Institute (InCSR) for the companies on human resource, work processes and optimisation issues;
- Public relations and social advertisement campaigns about the project, best practice of the companies, reconciliation of work and family life;
- Introduction of the project results to the Sustainability Index and Family Friendly Merchant
- International conference in Riga with presentation of the project results;
- Exchange visit and seminar in Denmark.
The project was implemented as an experiment, where service recipients (experimental group) was compared to the control group (participated in the project but did not receive the service. The experiment was implemented in three phases. The first phase took place for 4 months, where the services were fully paid by the project, without co-financing from the employers. The second phase took place for 2 months, where the service was paid at 80%, co-financing was provided by the employer and/or the service recipient. During the third phase, with duration of 4 months, the private co-financing amounted to 40%.
The project was implemented within the administrative territories of Jelgava, Riga and Valmiera cities.
The project duration was 36 months from 1st August 2015 till 31st July 2018.
The budget of the project was 1 001 524,17 EUR, incl. 20% co-financing from the national budget of Latvia.
For more about the project and its results, click here