In Ungheni, the number of young people aged 15–34 has halved in a decade. And yet here young people have something that many other places lack — a seat at the table of decisions, forums, a face-to-face conference with the mayors and, once, even a fund of their own.
The topic returned on 16 August, when the Ungheni District Youth Centre reported on its official page about a focus group it had just hosted: a few young people and a few women, at a table, about what keeps them from having a say in the community’s decisions. The discussion is part of the “Voci Egale” (Equal Voices) project of the “CONTACT-Cahul” Centre Association, which gathers, across several localities of the Centre–South region, what young people and women think about local public policy.
Ungheni does a lot for young people — concerts, camps, a youth week. The focus group also brought to the fore a less visible layer: the infrastructure through which young people reach the community’s decisions, built up in the district year after year.
Young people at the forefront: 35 members, from half of the localities
At the centre of this reflex are the young people themselves. The Ungheni District Youth Council brings together 35 members aged between 14 and 35, appointed from at least half of the district’s localities. It is not a narrow circle from the centre, but a structure designed to bring the villages to the table as well.
The young councillors do not wait to be called. They have a “Weekend School” where they build their skills, a feature through which they shine a light on “People Who Inspire” from the district, they turn out to clean up on World Cleanup Day and they collected books for a community library — a campaign we reported on in July. The council is made up of and led by young people chosen from among themselves; its president is Olga Toloacă.
The engine behind it: a centre that goes after young people
For these initiatives not to stay on paper, someone is needed to carry them. That someone is the Ungheni District Youth Centre, part of the national network of youth centres, with services of information, counselling, personal development and community projects. According to the Centre, since 2018 it has directly coordinated the district’s youth councils and organises the public events through which young people are heard: the District Youth Forum and a co-participation conference, where young people sit face to face with the mayors of the localities.
A concrete example: the Centre does not wait for young people from the villages to come to it — it goes to them. The Centre’s interim head, Alina Butnaru, explains on the institution’s official page:
The Ungheni District Youth Centre has a car we use to travel to the communities in the district, so as to reach as many young people from the villages as possible. Alina Butnaru, interim head of the Ungheni District Youth Centre
She also adds a practice that comes from the same care: the Ungheni Education Directorate covers the transport costs of young people from the villages to the Centre’s activities — so that distance is no longer the reason a young person is left out.
(A distinction often confused: the District Youth Centre, run by the District Council, is a different institution from the Municipal Youth Centre, run by the City Hall, which organises Youth Week. They are two structures, with their own programmes and budgets.)
And women, at the same table
The focus group at the Centre was not only about young people. The other half of the discussion — women’s participation — rests on a change already visible in the figures. At the 2023 local elections, of the 9,993 level-I local councillors elected across the country, 4,032 were women — 40.35%, according to Central Electoral Commission data. Their presence is therefore almost at parity where the vote is by lists. The point of a discussion like the one in Ungheni is the next step: for that presence to turn into a weighty word at every table where decisions are made, including in the posts where women are still few.
From the microphone to the budget: a fund held by young people
According to the Ministry of Education and Research, youth councils ensure the participation of young people in local decision-making processes and formulate recommendations to the authorities. That is exactly why an episode from Ungheni’s recent history deserves to be brought back from oblivion — because there, young people went from being listened to, to handling money.
In 2016 and 2017, under the Ungheni Community Foundation, a local YouthBank operated — a “Youth Fund” run by young people themselves: they raised money for the project ideas of children and young people in the town and the district and accounted for the fund’s activity before the local authorities. Not just a microphone, but a wallet too.
Today the idea has an institutional successor: since 2025, Ungheni municipality has a grants programme dedicated to youth organisations, initiative groups and the pupils’ and youth councils. It is the channel through which an initiative started by young people can once again reach local public money.
A bet, in a district that is losing its young people
The number of young people aged 15–34 in the district fell from 30,446 in 2014 to 15,166 in 2025 (provisional data) — almost a halving in a decade, according to National Bureau of Statistics data. Across the country, only 5.29% of local councillors are under 30 — a sign of how rarely a young person reaches, on their own, the room where decisions are made.
Against this background, the mechanisms of participation take on a practical purpose. A seat at the table, a direct conference with the mayors, once even a fund to raise and manage — for a young person who feels they have a say at home, these can be one more reason to stay.