Rede Empregar Lines Up Gulbenkian, 'la Caixa', IPDJ, IEFP and BNP Paribas Foundation Behind a Five-Founder NEET Coalition Backing 3,438 Young People Across 43 Projects — Tuesday's Fundação Launch Sets the Frame

Five anchor founders — the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, the Fundação 'la Caixa', the Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude (IPDJ — Portuguese Institute for Sport and Youth), the Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional (IEFP — Institute for Employment and Vocational Training) and the Fundação BNP Paribas — formally opened the Rede Empregar NEET coalition on Tuesday, 2 June 2026, at a 14:00 session held at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian's main campus in Lisbon. The launch consolidates four pre-existing employability programmes plus the IEFP institutional layer into a single coordinated network, with the joint commitment of supporting 3,438 young Portuguese NEETs (people Not in Employment, Education or Training) through 43 distinct projects distributed across the national territory.

The five founders and their underlying programmes

Each founder brings an existing NEET-focused programme into the network architecture, plus the institutional layer that the IEFP overlays on top:

• Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian → 'Gulbenkian Empregar': the Foundation's long-running employability arm targeting the 1,000-young-people support cohort that has been scaling steadily since the July 2025 public launch. Pedro Cunha, the Gulbenkian Empregar manager, is one of the operational anchors of the Rede.
• Fundação 'la Caixa' → 'Incorpora': the Spanish-origin labour-market integration programme that has been operating in Portugal as part of the Fundación 'la Caixa' iberian footprint, with a specific focus on the most-vulnerable cohort interface — long-term NEETs, the immigrant-background young-people layer, and those with multiple barriers to labour-market integration.
• IPDJ → 'Afirma-te Já': the public-institute formation-and-employment programme channelled through the Portugal 2030 funding window, with open applications running since April 2025. Afirma-te Já is structured to reach the NEET cohort through the IPDJ's existing youth-services delegations across the 18 distritos.
• IEFP: the public Employment-and-Vocational-Training institute serves as the institutional partner and policy-anchoring layer, slotting the Rede's projects into the broader Estratégia Nacional para os NEET public-policy frame.
• Fundação BNP Paribas: the corporate foundation rounds out the coalition with the corporate-philanthropy resource pool and the multinational corporate-onboarding-side employer network.

The 3,438 number — who the cohort actually is

The coalition's joint commitment is to support 3,438 NEET young people in the age bracket 15 to 34 — with the European Union's standard NEET classification (15-29 years old) extended at the upper end to capture the post-secondary cohort that is still working through the school-to-work transition. Specifically, the Rede targets:

• Young people who have completed their formal education but remain unemployed for an extended period;
• Those who have interrupted their training and are unable to land a labour-market entry job;
• The discouraged worker cohort — young people who have stopped actively searching for work because the prior search has yielded no offers, and who are not enrolled in any training programme;
• Those holding precarious short-duration low-wage employment — the cohort that sits in the formal-labour-force statistics as employed but whose attachment to the labour market is tenuous.

The 43-project portfolio spans the full geography from Trás-os-Montes down through the Algarve, with a mix of urban-centro (Lisboa, Porto, Coimbra, Braga, Évora) and rural-corridor (Beira Interior, Alentejo Interior, Algarvio Interior) initiatives. Specific reported project examples include a Setúbal-based programme targeting Asian-immigrant-community youth, and a music-and-artistic-expression entrepreneurship programme channelling cultural-sector skills into business-creation pathways.

Portugal's NEET share — the Eurostat backdrop

The macroeconomic frame against which the Rede Empregar is opening is one of structural Portuguese outperformance against the EU NEET average, but with persistent within-cohort heterogeneity:

• The most recent Eurostat read on Portuguese NEETs (ages 15-29) places the rate at 8.7% for 2024 and broadly stable in the 8%-9% range in 2025 — sixth-lowest in the EU and three full points inside the EU-27 average of 11%.
• That outperformance is, however, concentrated among the medium-and-higher educational-attainment cohort. The lower-attainment cohort, the immigrant-background cohort, the foster-and-care-leaver cohort and the disability-adjusted cohort all show NEET rates well above the headline national average.
• The 22 May 2026 piece in the Portugal Brief archive on the Eurostat NEET tape — which read Portugal at the same sixth-lowest position — captures the institutional context against which the Rede is operating.

The Rede's 3,438-person cohort is specifically targeted at the harder-to-reach end of the distribution — the discouraged-worker, low-attainment, multiple-barrier slice that the headline 8.7% Eurostat read consistently understates.

How the projects actually function on the ground

The 43-project portfolio runs on a mix of operational models:

• Direct employment-placement projects: structured employer-onboarding partnerships with SMEs, intermediated by the founder organisations' staffing-and-onboarding teams.
• Vocational-training projects: short-duration (3-9 month) skills-and-certification cycles in shortage-occupation areas like nursing assistant, kitchen brigade, logistics-and-warehousing, light-electrical and renewable-installation, basic IT helpdesk, retail-and-customer-service supervision.
• Entrepreneurship-track projects: microenterprise-and-self-employment seed-funding plus mentorship — the music-and-artistic-expression entrepreneurship programme is one example, with similar models in food-and-beverage and creative-craft.
• Community-anchor projects: place-based interventions in the harder-to-reach neighbourhood pockets, where the local-anchor association (often a parish-level cultural or sports association) carries the day-to-day case-management workload.

The Rede's central operational frame is a shared case-management and tracking layer, so that a young person who steps into one founder's project can be referred across the network when a different intervention fits better, without losing the case-history continuity.

How the Rede sits inside the public-policy stack

The Rede Empregar fits between two layers of the public-policy stack:

• Above it sits the Estratégia Nacional para os NEET, the cross-cutting public-policy framework that the IEFP coordinates with the Ministério do Trabalho, Solidariedade e Segurança Social and the Ministério da Educação, Ciência e Inovação. The Rede operationalises a slice of that strategy on the ground, with the IEFP serving as the institutional bridge.
• Alongside it sits the Garantia Jovem (Youth Guarantee) public-policy commitment — the EU-backed framework guaranteeing every young person under 30 access to a quality job offer, continued education, an apprenticeship or a traineeship within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education. The Rede's projects are designed to be Garantia-Jovem-compatible where the cohort overlap supports it.
• Below it sits the parish-level operational network of the founder organisations and their delivery partners — the actual touchpoints where a young person encounters the support.

The corporate-foundation context — why BNP Paribas joined the table

The presence of the Fundação BNP Paribas at the founder table places the Rede inside the broader European-bank corporate-philanthropy infrastructure. BNP Paribas Portugal — through the BNP Paribas Securities Services, BNP Paribas Personal Finance and Cetelem subsidiaries plus the broader Iberian banking footprint — already operates one of the deepest corporate-onboarding pipelines in the Portuguese labour market. Plugging the foundation arm into the Rede gives the coalition direct employer-side traction with a large multinational employer.

The same logic, scaled down, underpins the 'la Caixa' / Incorpora pairing — la Caixa's banking presence in Iberia gives Incorpora a deep employer-side pool from which to draw labour-market placements.

Expat angle — practical implications

For expat readers, the Rede Empregar has several practical implications:

• For expats with NEET-band children: the network is open to all young people legally resident in Portugal in the 15-34 age band — including the dependants of expat residents. The Gulbenkian Empregar and IPDJ Afirma-te Já pathways have referral routes accessible through the local IEFP centre, the local IPDJ delegation, or the founder organisations directly.
• For expat employers and SMEs: the network is actively pulling in employer-side partners. SMEs with seasonal or year-round entry-level roles — Algarvio hospitality houses, Lisboa-and-Porto restaurants, the small-format retail chains, the touristic-hospitality cluster, the construction-and-renovation cluster — can plug into the placement pipeline through the founder organisations or through the IEFP local centre.
• For expat foundations and philanthropy: the Rede's coalition structure leaves explicit room for additional corporate-foundation or family-foundation entrants. The operational and reporting layer is now standing, which lowers the threshold for additional founders to bring projects into the network.
• For expat-community youth-services organisations: the network is open to delivery-partner participation. Organisations operating in the 'la Caixa' Incorpora style — labour-market integration with a specific vulnerable-cohort focus — can apply to plug into the network as a delivery partner.
• For the broader expat sense of the Portuguese labour market: the Rede is the operational expression of an explicit policy bet that the Portuguese NEET cohort can be moved meaningfully even at the harder-to-reach end. If it works, the multiplier effect on the broader labour-market participation rate compounds over the next three-to-five-year cycle.

Watch list — what to track from here

• The first six-month operational read on placements and qualifications, expected around the end of Q4 2026, will be the first concrete read on whether the network's case-management-and-referral architecture is delivering the multiplier the founders are pricing in.
• The next Eurostat NEET tape for 2025 reference-year data, due in the second half of 2026, will frame whether the 8.7% Portuguese rate is holding or drifting — and whether the Rede's cohort selection is reaching the right slice of the distribution.
• The next round of corporate-foundation entrants into the network. Several other large Portuguese-presence multinationals — Galp, EDP, Jerónimo Martins, Sonae, BPI, Santander — operate corporate-philanthropy arms with explicit youth-employability programmes. Any one of them joining as a sixth or seventh founder would meaningfully scale the cohort the Rede reaches.
• The Garantia Jovem refresh at the EU level. Brussels has been reworking the Youth Guarantee architecture for the 2027-2033 envelope. Any tightening of the four-month-offer obligation will pull more weight onto the operational delivery layer that the Rede now embodies.
• The Trabalho XXI labour-package interaction. The Rede's placement pipeline runs into the broader labour-law frame currently in Parliamentary discussion. The contractual-flexibility and apprenticeship-and-traineeship contours of Trabalho XXI will shape what the placement-side of the Rede can actually offer the cohort.

The Tuesday launch at the Gulbenkian closes one chapter — the architecture-design and coalition-assembly phase — and opens the operational chapter. The 3,438-person cohort is now in the funnel; the next twelve months will read whether the coalition design lives up to the ambition tabled.