UNIC Represents Cyprus at European Social Services Index Working Group Meeting 2025
Dr. Despina Cochliou, Assistant Professor of Social Work, represented Cyprus and the University of Nicosia’s Social Work Programme at the European Social Services Index Working Group Meeting 2025, held on 14-15 October 2025 in Brussels, Belgium.
The European Social Services Index (SSI) https://www.esn-eu.org/social-services-index is an initiative launched by the European Social Network (ESN) in 2023 to better understand and compare the situation of social services across different European Union (EU) Member States. This meeting brings together the members of the SSI Working Group and European Commission officials to discuss the evidence gathered and assess how this can be used to feed into the European Semester.
Each year, with the support of our SSI Working Group, ESN gathers national data about several countries’ social services legislation, expenditure, and coverage. In 2025, data were collected from 16 countries: Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.
The data collected helps provide evidence for the European Commission to formulate its recommendations to national governments within the framework of the European Semester – an annual review of national economic, social, and budgetary policies aimed at identifying socio-economic challenges in EU Member States and formulating proposals on how they could address these. ESN gets involved in this process to ensure that the European Commission fully knows the situation of social services and that its recommendations meet social services’ needs.
