On Thursday, 25 June, in Ungheni, at 35 Romană Street, a job fair for young people takes place — “JOB pentru TINEri,” three hours in which high-school students and graduates can talk face to face with employers from the district. It is not an initiative of the authorities: it is organised by a youth NGO, “Avanti,” together with the Ungheni District Youth Centre and the local Employment Office — that is, largely by civil society and by young people who set out to do something. The problem they are addressing is huge and a decade old: Ungheni’s young people are disappearing from the statistics, year after year.
Half of the young, gone in 11 years
The figure that should unsettle any mayor in the district comes from the National Bureau of Statistics. In 2014, 30,446 young people aged 15 to 34 lived in the Ungheni district. In 2025 there were 15,166 left — that is, half vanished in eleven years.
The decline is not gentle but accelerating, and it hits hardest exactly at the age when a person starts a career: the 20–24 group collapsed from 8,057 to 3,156 people — minus 61 percent. For comparison, the district’s total population fell over the same period from 96,292 to 74,507 inhabitants, that is “only” by 22.6 percent. The young, therefore, are leaving more than twice as fast as the population shrinks overall — a mix of migration and ever fewer children.
And yet jobs exist
This is where the paradox comes in. Ungheni is not a district without an economy. On the contrary: the “Ungheni-Business” Free Economic Zone, with 2,610 employees at the end of 2024, is the second-largest employer among all the free economic zones in the country, after Bălți. And at the National Employment Agency, the district is among the country’s leaders for registered vacancies: 156 as of 30 April 2026, and 260 as of 26 June — the third figure after Chișinău (8,284) and Bălți (832).
In other words, the 25 June fair does not come to fill a gap in offers. Jobs are there. The real question is why they don’t keep the young.
Nearly a third of the young are neither in school nor at work
A first answer lies in a dry indicator: the NEET rate — young people who are neither in education, nor in employment, nor in any training. In the Centre region, which includes the Ungheni district, nearly 28.3% of young people aged 15–29 were in this situation in 2025 — almost a third, well above the national average of 23.2 percent. For the younger group, 15–24, the rate is 19.4%, and young women are more exposed than men.
These are young people who are neither studying nor working — exactly the reserve such a fair is trying to re-engage. Only, a three-hour event, however well run, cannot reach them on its own: it needs policies to carry it on, beyond the day of the fair.
What the Ungheni market actually pays
A second answer is on the payslip. In 2024, the average gross wage in the Ungheni district was 11,321 lei — almost a fifth (19%) below the national average of 13,990 lei. And the economy-wide average has kept rising since, topping 15,000 lei in 2025, which deepens the gap.
Not all jobs are equal: the best paid remains public administration (15,211 lei), followed by industry and construction (12,035 lei) — the category the free zone belongs to. At the bottom are education (10,610 lei) and agriculture (8,763 lei). The reverse must be said too: among the country’s 35 territories, Ungheni is not at the bottom but in 27th place — the national average is “inflated” by Chișinău (nearly 17,000 lei) and Bălți. The problem, then, is not that Ungheni pays worst, but that a young person compares not with the neighbouring district, but with the capital — and packs a bag.
The magnet that is weakening
There is one more detail that spoils the picture: even the local engine has slowed. The industrial output of the Ungheni free zone fell by 20.9% in 2024, and nationally the zones lost more than 1,700 jobs that year amid the withdrawal of some investors from the car-cable industry. The zone’s land in Ungheni, incidentally, is only 37% developed. The average wage paid in the free economic zones — about 11,315 lei — is itself almost a quarter below the real-sector average of the economy.
The magnet still works, but it pulls more weakly than a few years ago — exactly when it would need to pull harder.
What is down to volunteers — and what is down to the state
Placed side by side, the figures add up to a single story: a district with half the young people it had a decade ago, with nearly a third of those who remain outside school and work, with wages below the national average — but with unfilled jobs and the second-largest free-zone employer in Moldova. It is not a lack of offers; it is a mismatch between what the young are looking for and what home, for now, offers them.
It is exactly the paradox we also met in Ungheni’s schools, left with 88 unfilled teaching posts — not because “there are no people,” but because too few choose to stay.
Against this backdrop, the very fact that a fair like this is carried, in large part, by a youth NGO and volunteers says something in itself: the concrete response comes from civil society, not from those who hold the heavy levers. And what it does is far from small — it can bring a graduate face to face with a local employer and catch a young person at the exact moment they are weighing whether to leave. What it cannot do, on its own, is raise a wage, restart the district’s industrial engine or stop a train to Bucharest: those require decisions taken elsewhere, and by others. The question it leaves open is not “where are the jobs,” but “how much do they pay and how secure is the future” — and the answer is given not by three hours in a hall, but by the policies that ought to follow.
The figures come from the National Bureau of Statistics database (population, NEET, wages), from the official report on the free economic zones for 2024, and from the National Employment Agency’s “Labour market: vacancies” bulletins (vacancies, territorial section). The NEET and employment data are calculated for the Centre region, not for the district; the average wage is for the Ungheni district. The exact number of free-zone employees and the list of employers present at the fair are yet to be confirmed by the zone’s administration.
Correction — 31 July 2026
The original version stated that Ungheni district had “about 936” registered job vacancies, “the third figure after Chișinău and Bălți”. That figure is not supported by any National Employment Agency publication. According to the official bulletins, the district had 183 vacancies on 31 December 2025, 146 on 5 March 2026, 156 on 30 April 2026 and 260 on 26 June 2026 — on that last date it was indeed the third in the country, after Chișinău and Bălți. On the day this article was published, the most recent bulletin was the one from 30 April, when the district ranked ninth. We have corrected the passage and replaced the generic link to the agency’s website with the specific bulletins. The article’s finding — that unfilled jobs exist in the district — still stands.