A day in the life of…
RADU DANII

The best time to visit Moldova is late spring, summer or early autumn. The country and its capital Chişinău are enveloped in greenery. It's pleasant to stroll through the streets, lie in the shade of a park and gaze up at the city's historic buildings. Flanked on either side by Ukraine and Romania, Moldova has also been influenced by its neighbours in terms of architecture.

In recent months, I have taken to long walks through the streets of Chişinău. Because of the pandemic, to minimise the risk of infection I walk the six kilometres between my home and the SDC office once or twice a week. That way I avoid crowded public transport. On the other days, I work from home. I have three children: a 14-year-old son, an 11-year-old daughter, and a little girl who is two. During the day, my older children go to school – one in the morning, the other in the afternoon – and the little one stays at home. I'm lucky that my wife has time to look after them in this very challenging period.

Since the start of the pandemic, I've mostly been teleworking. I used to make field visits every three months to meet with project partners. Now I stay in touch remotely, using the various communication apps I have downloaded on my phone. This allows me to organise meetings more easily and more often, but it's tiring to carry out the discussions online, and to be stuck at home all the time with never a change of scenery. And I miss the human, face-to-face contact with my colleagues.

Switzerland has been supporting Moldova since 2000, initially through a humanitarian programme, and since 2009 via development cooperation and development projects. Despite enormous progress, the country remains the Cinderella of Europe. Poverty affects Moldova's rural areas especially. The current SDC strategy has three priorities: healthcare reform, strengthening local governance, economic development and employment.

Despite the pandemic, our projects are still on schedule. I oversee the local governance programme. First of all, we want to involve local people and especially more disadvantaged groups, so that they have a say in issues that affect them. We also want to increase the resources of local authorities to enable them to respond adequately to the needs of local people. Finally, at national level we help the government to promote the reforms needed to foster decentralisation.

A lack of job prospects, high unemployment and high emigration are obstacles to the country's economic development. About 25% of the population works abroad. One of our programmes focuses on precisely this issue of migration and economic development in Moldova. In cooperation with the government, we supported the creation of hometown associations. The associations work with the local authorities to put the remittances of the diaspora towards various projects in the communities where they grew up, to improve for example water supply, waste collection, public lighting, sewerage and roads. So far we have supported over 200 of these associations around the country. The initiative has been a huge success; so much so that this model of economic development has been replicated 200 times without our assistance.