Webinar – knowledge transfer “Data for rural areas: towards smarter rural policies” organised by the EU project GRANULAR and the Directorate General of the European Commission.

The existence of an adequate database is of particular importance for the design and planning of public policies in the field of sustainable development. Therefore, the EU funded the GRANULAR project (https://www.ruralgranular.eu/knowledge-transfer-accelerator/), with the participation of the Directorate General of the European Commission (https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive-agencies/joint-research-centre_en)

Simone Sasso, European Commission, General Directorate, Joint Research Centre. It is pointed out that rural citizens across the European Union are not satisfied with the rural policies that are planned and implemented. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a new approach (which includes the prior definition of indicators and data collection) in order to develop rural development plans that will be more effective and that will improve the situation in rural areas and the quality of life of citizens in these regions.

The results showed that the level of investment in rural areas varies across countries, but that the share of innovative new companies in total investment in rural areas is below 1%. The largest investments are in agriculture, but new sectors are also emerging: transport, finance and robotics.

Trends show that migration from rural areas (especially young people), along with the aging population, is a very unfavorable phenomenon that requires complex and systemic solutions.

Ian McCallum, GRANULAR project introduced the participants to the project’s objectives, the most important of which is data collection, using open sources and adequate search keywords. Of particular interest were data related to the quality of life in rural areas.

The webinar was attended by 68 participants.

During the project, a rural development database was developed that offers open access:https://platform.ruralgranular.eu/collection/All/1

Prof. Dr. Mirjana Radovanović participated as a representative of the EDUCIRC2022 project, with the aim of introducing the work of the Directorate General of the European Commission and the results of the project related to the development of a database on the situation in rural areas – very close to the database collected within the EDUCIRC2022 project.