Portugal Keeps Its Escolhas Youth Inclusion Programme Running Until March, and Sets Aside 5.85 Million Euros Still Owed for 2024 and 2025

The Programa Escolhas (Choices Programme), Portugal's main national scheme for children and young people from poor neighbourhoods, has been kept running for another six months, a week after its current funding cycle ran out. A resolution of the Council of Ministers published in the Diário da República (the official gazette) on Thursday extends the programme's ninth generation to 31 March 2027, with effect from 1 October 2026.

The ninth generation, approved in July 2023, ran from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2026. The government says in the resolution that the tenth generation is still being prepared, and that its administrative, regulatory and financial procedures need to be completed first. The six-month extension, it says, keeps project teams in place and avoids breaks in the work with "children, young people, families and communities".

The resolution is dated 9 September, three weeks before the cycle ended, but it only reached the gazette on 8 October, so the extension is backdated.

Where the money comes from

The resolution authorises 2,925,000 euros for the rest of 2026. The money comes from the own revenue of the Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional (IEFP, the Institute for Employment and Vocational Training) and passes under a protocol to the Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude (IPDJ, the Portuguese Institute for Sport and Youth), which has run the programme since October 2023. The text says no top-up from the Finance Ministry's central reserves will be used for it.

A second clause deals with older bills. It authorises up to 5,850,000 euros in 2027 "for the settlement of the amounts owed for the financing of the Programa Escolhas in 2024 and 2025". That money is to be entered in the 2027 budget of the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (AIMA, the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) and transferred to the IPDJ. The resolution does not say why the 2024 and 2025 amounts were not paid in those years.

All the technical, financial and regulatory rules of the ninth generation stay in force during the extension.

What the programme does

Escolhas was created in 2001. It does not run activities itself: it funds local projects designed and carried out by consortia of at least four public or private bodies, in areas the IPDJ describes as socioeconomically vulnerable. According to the IPDJ, its priority public is young people aged 6 to 25 who have left school early, are not in work or training, are in precarious work, are under youth justice or child protection measures, are in prison, or have suffered violence or discrimination. Their families can take part too.

The ninth generation has two strands. One covers school success, early school leaving, training and employment; the other covers community activity and citizenship, with arts and sport used as tools for inclusion. The government's 2023 resolution asked the projects to work with several ministries, among them those responsible for equality and migration.

The next generation

No date has been set for the tenth generation's call for projects. On its Escolhas page, the IPDJ invites organisations that want to be told when applications open to write to [email protected] with "Aviso E10G" in the subject line.

The extension coincides with a change of leadership at AIMA, whose budget will carry the arrears: the government said this week that the agency's focus would now move from the backlog to integration.