[Publication] The Right to Stay: Young Women in the EU’s Remote and Rural Areas

2. No EU instrument targets young women in RRA as a group – they are instead reached as women, young people, rural residents or young farmers

Each category can provide access to support, but none requires programmes to address the combined barriers of gender, age, and place. CP allocations are based primarily on regional economic development rather than rurality or remoteness, so declining rural areas within more developed regions do not receive additional allocations.

Around 79% of planned 2021–2027 funding under the ERDF, the Cohesion Fund (CF), the ESF+, the Just Transition Fund (JTF) and the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund (EMFAF) carries no explicit territorial code. Monitoring records sex, age and territory separately rather than combining them. Therefore, neither the scale of support reaching young women in RRA nor its results can be established.

3. CP funding and complementary LEADER support can address barriers to staying where Managing Authorities and local organisations prioritise them, but their effects on decisions to stay, leave or return remain unmeasured

The study’s project screening identified no ERDF or ESF/ESF+ project in the 2014–2020 or 2021–2027 periods specifically targeting young women in RRA. Six case studies were conducted, including ESF/ESF+ and ERDF projects in Czechia, Finland, Greece, Hungary and Italy, and an Austrian initiative financed through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) and delivered through the Liaison entre actions de développement de l’économie rurale (LEADER) approach. The case studies show that funding delivered additional staff, outreach, mentoring, social inclusion activities, planned childcare capacity and multi-year continuity that would otherwise have been hard to sustain locally.

In Italy, Czechia and Austria, activities were held where participants lived rather than in regional centres, reducing travel for those whose participation was limited by distance and care responsibilities. However, none of the cases provides evidence on whether young women stay, leave or return, and project monitoring does not capture such effects.

4. The proposed European Fund for 2028–2034 gives greater recognition to rural needs but does not identify the group most likely to leave

The proposed Regulation establishing the European Fund (National and Regional Partnership Plan (NRPP) Regulation, COM(2025) 565) for the first time takes rural needs into account in the allocation methodology and makes supporting the ‘right to stay’ one of the Fund’s objectives. Among territorial categories, it sets a minimum allocation only for less developed regions. The European Commission’s November 2025 proposal for a rural target would add a minimum share for rural areas, without distinguishing remote areas. Neither the NRPP Regulation nor the proposed Performance Regulation includes a target category for young women in RRA, or monitoring that combines gender, age, and territory.

Policy recommendations

The study’s recommendations aim to make young women in RRA visible in how the EU targets, allocates, delivers, and monitors support. For the 2028–2034 MFF, the recommendations on the NRPP Regulation and the Performance Regulation include:

• a requirement for each NRPP to analyse disparities between young women and men by type of territory and, where young women in RRA are disadvantaged, to set out combined measures addressing this;
• the exclusion of interventions under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from the proposed target of at least 10% of each Plan for rural areas, so that the target is met through measures such as services, care, transport and employment. Moreover, reporting on the share of the target that reaches remote areas;
• requirements for territorial strategies under Community-Led Local Development (CLLD) and Integrated Territorial Investment (ITI) to analyse the ratio of young women to young men and set measures where young women are underrepresented, and use this ratio to define their coverage, including in transition and more developed regions;
• selection criteria favouring strategies and operations that combine employment or training with services such as childcare or transport, fund outreach and provide multi-annual support;
• the financing of childcare and LTC facilities together with the staff and operating costs needed to run them, with a five-year staffing and operating plan as a condition for selection;
• a breakdown of indicator data on people reached by sex, age group, and degree of urbanisation; recording the location of measures at the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 level; and evaluating results for young women in RRA where Plans identify them as disadvantaged.

For the upcoming ‘Right to Stay’ Strategy, the recommendations include:

• the inclusion of young women in RRA among the Strategy’s priority groups and objectives for people as well as places, such as reducing the gap between the numbers of young women and young men in RRA, supported by EU-level reporting on how many young women stay in, leave and return to RRA, also used to assess the European Fund’s right-to-stay objective;
• priority for childcare and LTC capacity in RRA in the Strategy’s guidance on EU funds, with progress towards the 2030 Barcelona targets[1] reported by degree of urbanisation, and reference travel times by public transport from RRA to care and healthcare services;
• measures supporting local education and employment, support for women’s entrepreneurship with administrative requirements proportionate to business size, routes from community engagement into local decision-making, and Youth Guarantee outreach directed towards young women in RRA.

For EU data and evidence, the recommendations include:

• publication of the main EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) indicators by sex, age group and degree of urbanisation, using existing microdata;
• a measure of remoteness to complement the degree-of-urbanisation breakdowns used in EU social statistics, where sample sizes allow;
• harmonised measures of effective access to employment, education and training, and essential services that capture factors such as available transport, travel time and cost.

[1] The target includes that at least 45% of children under 3 should participate in formal childcare or education.