Brussels, 16/05/2002 (Agence Europe) - In the context of the Spanish Presidency, a conference on "NetWorking for Inclusion" is being held in Barcelona on 16 and 17 May, to examine how to maximise the impact of the new Community Equal programme. The latter, aimed at implementing instruments to combat discrimination and inequalities on the labour market has an EC budget of 3.26 bn euro for the period 2000-2006. Work, in which the Director General for Employment in the European Commission, Odile Quintin is taking part, is taking the form of a plenary session dealing with integration strategies at national and European levels, and two thematic workshops on the best way to take account of the results of Equal within European employment and social inclusion strategies. Ms. Quintin intends taking the opportunity of calling for all efforts deployed in the EU to be intensified, so as to avoid vulnerable groups being evicted from the labour market.
You may recall that national authorities are responsible for implementing programmes of EC initiative, like Equal, in Member States; the beneficiaries are Equal's development partners, i.e., groups generally made up of training services, local authorities and NGOs (Info: empl-equal-info@cec.eu.int Site: http: //europa.eu.int/comm/equal).