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The launch of Red Cross Denmark's Fast Track programme, which focuses on early refugee employment, offers an opportunity to explore the relationship between local employment of refugees and the sustainability of rural life.
Since 2015 Denmark has turned the employment of refugees into a national strategy. Through a tripartite agreement with the Confederation of Danish Employers and Local Government Denmark (the union of municipalities) this reconfiguration of thinking about integration has reverberated throughout municipal and corporate Denmark.
For example, a major initiative was set up by the eight municipalities of Copenhagen to establish refugee internships, for which promotional posters have been distributed around the capital. Employment initiatives aimed at refugees have also been established in larger companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Danfoss, Grundfoss, Arriva and NCC. In addition, in order to facilitate quicker assessment of refugees' work competence, the government has sponsored a phone hotline to provide assistance to municipal authorities, in particular to help employees - for example, by providing translation of a refugee's documentation into Danish - to understand the educational background of a particular refugee.
Many of these initiatives are tied together by a newly launched, practice-oriented and state-initiated programme of employment education, the 'Integrationsgrundsuddannelse' (IGU), or 'basic integration education', which - through a combination of formal schooling and practical internships - is aimed specifically at aligning competencies of refugees with demand in the Danish labour market. But while the IGU is oriented towards recognised refugees, the new Red Cross initiative begins in the asylum phase.
The Fast Track programme
The Fast Track programme is an effort to facilitate early access to the local labour market for refugees while they are still in the asylum phase, and it has been tested and implemented in five Danish municipalities between 2015 and 2017. Normally refugees in Denmark are distributed across its 98 municipalities, in effect detaching the locality of where they claimed asylum from the locality where they come to live as refugees. With Fast Track, however, the...