PROSECO

Social procurement is crucial for promoting social inclusion and employment for people with a distance to the labour market. This project aims to enhance the capacity of local, provincial and regional authorities, and the social economy in social procurement practices. Not only public authorities can buy in social responsible ways, also for-profit enterprises (the regular economy) more and more take social aspects into account (due to the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive). The primary goal of the project is job creation for people with significant distance to the labour market using social clauses in public and private procurement as a key tool.

Project objectives and activities
To support participating regions in improving policy instruments and fostering an environment conducive to social procurement, the goal of this project project is to improve the ability of:
(1) local, provincial, regional authorities (and all actors falling within the scope of public procurement legislation) to:
- integrate social economy enterprises into their procurement procedures.
- encourage regular companies through public procurement to work together with the social economy and/or to give opportunities to people with a distance to the labour market.
(2) social economy companies and partnerships to generate (large) contracts from public authorities and regular companies.
(3) regular companies
- to buy from the social economy
- to create opportunities for people with a distance to the labour market
(4) finding innovative ways to realise societal goals such as social outcome contracting and community wealth building.

This project forms a strong partnership of 11 organizations, including nine public authorities at regional and local levels, nine policy instruments and an experienced civil society organization across nine countries. Through this collaboration, the project aims to promote inclusion of people who have difficulties in accessing the labour market.