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#migration

3 articles
A crowd of cheerful young people at an open-air evening concert, hands raised toward a stage lit with warm colored lights; a summer-festival atmosphere.
LOCAL

Twice a national "Youth Capital," Ungheni dedicates a week to a shrinking youth

From 10 to 16 August, the Ungheni city hall and the Municipal Youth Centre are holding "Youth Week" (ZiT 2026) around International Youth Day on 12 August. Ungheni has good reason to call itself a "city of youth" — it held the national title of Youth Capital twice, in 2011 and 2023. But the celebration takes place in a district the young leave first: the number of people aged 15–34 has halved over the past decade, faster than the national average. We explain what the event is, where the "city of youth" identity comes from, and why, here, a youth week is more than a summer party.

Ion Calmis·25 July 2026· Explainer
Working meeting in the hall of the Ungheni District Council: participants seated at a long table, the flags of the Republic of Moldova and the European Union, the MILEstone project banner and a wall with the names of the district's localities.
ECONOMY & FEZ

Ungheni District, down nearly a quarter of its population, prepares for workers from Nepal and India

At the 22 July meeting of the European MILEstone project, employers in agriculture, manufacturing and services confirmed, according to the council's statement, their readiness to hire workers from outside the EU, while the District Council is looking for ways to bring to life a Migrant Integration Centre — the first of its kind in a district, according to publicly available information. Behind the announcement stand hard numbers: the district went from 96.471 to 73.971 inhabitants in 12 years, the number of young people aged 20–34 fell by 58%, and in 2025 Nepal became the leading country of origin for foreign workers arriving in Moldova.

Ion Calmis·22 July 2026· News
Illustration: young people talking with company representatives at booths during a job fair in a bright hall.
ECONOMY & FEZ

In Ungheni, the number of young people has halved in 11 years — and a job fair is looking for a reason to keep them

On Thursday, 25 June, a youth NGO and volunteers run a job fair for young people in Ungheni. The event lasts three hours; the problem it touches has lasted a decade. The number of 15–34-year-olds in the district has halved since 2014, wages are almost a fifth below the national average, and nearly a third of the region's young people are neither in school nor at work. And yet jobs do exist — the paradox that, in fact, tells the whole story.

Ion Calmis·16 June 2026· Analysis