This story presents you a project developed in order to support governments in the Danube Region to find solution in order to make the region more attractive for people living in the area.

Migration from the South-East Europe countries to the richer EU countries in the western part of the continent is already a fact. The same situation occurs in the eastern parts of the Danube Region – people leave their home regions to move to western parts of the Danube Region.

This is the effect is partly caused by uneven social and economic development between the eastern and western part of the Danube Region, in second half of the 20th century. The drivers for moving to west are not only economy. Same situation can be observed in many other fields of the human activities: different environmental issues and threats, low transport connectivity, insufficient energy connections, challenges pertaining to safety and security. These issues may also cause the migration of the young people (“brains”) e.g. from Romania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina to places they find more attractive.

These countries are now facing a shortage in human resources and new attractive solutions should be in place for keeping people at home, therefore the politicians have to act.

Attractiveness of the regions can be measured and compared using the reliable data from reliable data sources: EUROSTAT, OECD, European Commission etc. Why is one country more visited than another? What makes a big difference between the air quality of one country comparing to another? Why in some countries people live longer than another? There are more aspects than these three, that show one country as an attractive place to live rather another. It is important yet for the decision makers not to ignore these aspects (this information) and to do something with it, in order to make their regions an attractive place to live in.

A team from 12 countries participating in the #EUSDR came together and developed ATTRACTIVE DANUBE, a project meant to increase availability of clear comparable data in online tools, presenting information to a large audience (politicians, citizens, academia, private sector). Development of the tools was accompanied by a capacity building programme.

Therefore, an interactive cartographic application was developed in order to offer statistical data and attractiveness indicators about the whole Danube Region (Common Territorial Attractiveness Monitoring Platform – CO-TAMP), on one hand, and about each project partner country in the Danube Region (National Territorial Attractiveness Monitoring Platforms – N-TAMP), on the other hand.

ATTRACTIVE DANUBE team then organized information and capacity building workshops in 11 countries in order to promote these platforms, explain what they offer and teach the interested people how to work with the data. The audience, both transnational and national, included local and regional policy makers, their data analysts, urban planners coming from almost 600 institutions from the project countries. They came to get information about indicators, to learn “what does it do” and “how can I use it”, new attitude to a policy or to a decision-making process. The learning part was usually followed by the discussions analyzing the cross-sector usage of the online tools, stressing out the need of reliable data or even the need of more new data.

The project itself was a kick-off for evidence-based planning and decision making in the Danube countries. The tools and knowledge transferred at the workshops have to be brought back home to the institutions and have to be applied. These tools offer important data for experts and specialists, so their value is obvious but decision makers have to use this data efficiently to make life more attractive in the eastern European countries.