Imagine waking up with nowhere to be. Not the pleasant kind of nowhere — the kind you earn after a long week, when you stretch into a slow morning and enjoy the luxury of an empty calendar. No. This is the other kind. The kind where the ceiling above your bed has become too familiar. Where your phone fills with notifications from everyone except an employer. Where another day opens in front of you like a room you have already been trapped inside for months.

This is what it can feel like to be young and invisible to the world of work.

There is a word in bureaucratic language — NEET — that stands for Not in Employment, Education, or Training. It is a clinical acronym. It does not capture what it feels like to be twenty-three, holding an economics degree and sending out CVs that receive no response. It says nothing about Kristjan, eighteen years old, growing up without parental care in a country where the people meant to catch you are sometimes missing too.

Three letters cannot hold all of that.

But the people inside those letters are real. In Albania, there are tens of thousands of them: young men and women drifting in the space between school and work, between who they were told they could become and what the morning actually looks like.

Kejvi Kaçaj knows that space well.

Born in 1999 and with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he had done everything he was supposed to do. He studied. He graduated. He worked data-entry jobs in the private sector — the kind of work that pays little and demands everything. He was not lazy. He was not unambitious. He was simply stuck, caught between a degree pointing in one direction and a labour market already moving somewhere else.

“You feel like you are running, but the ground isn’t moving,” is how many young people describe it. The effort is real. The result isn’t.

For Kristjani, the feeling had sharper edges.

He grew up in Shkodër without a family safety net, without the quiet infrastructure of belonging that many people take for granted — someone to call when the rent is due, someone who knows a someone, someone who remembers your birthday and asks what you want to do with your life.

He had none of that.

What he had was time. And time without direction has a way of becoming its own kind of punishment.

He did not know the Youth Guarantee Programme existed. That may be the cruelest part of the story — not that support was unavailable, but that it remained invisible to the people who needed it most.

What reached him first were outreach workers from YWCA, one of the organizations operating as part of the EU4Youth programme and tasked with finding the young people the system had not reached yet. They knocked on doors. They showed up where young people were. They sat with him and asked a simple question:

What do you want?

He said he wanted to cook.

On paper, what followed sounds small: a referral, a visit to the Employment Office in Shkodër, a conversation with a counsellor, a registration form.

But for someone who has spent months — sometimes years — receiving the message, through silence and closed doors, that the system is not built for them, walking into that office is not a small thing.

It is enormous.