The municipality of Prilep will for the first time pay 3,000 denars for every child enrolled in the first grade at primary schools on its territory. The public call is open from 2 to 18 September 2026, with the conditions, the paperwork and the form published on the municipality's official website.

Three thousand denars. Around 49 euros. For one first-grader, once.

The sum is small, but it is a decision

It is easy to sneer at the figure, and that would be a mistake. School supplies, a backpack, shoes and equipment for the first grade cost many times more, and this payment will not cover even a third of it. But that is not what makes this kind of measure useful or useless.

The difference is that the municipality decided to set money aside on a specific ground, with a published public call, a deadline and a form. Which means there is a document by which anyone can check how many children applied, how many received it and how much was paid out in total. When aid is handed out without a call, no such check exists.

Where this fits

Prilep is not alone. Municipalities across Macedonia handed out more than 4 million euros in financial aid last year on 92 different grounds, according to research by the Centre for Civil Communications. Support for a first-grader is one of the few items that most municipalities have - but the amount is not the same anywhere, ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 denars.

So a first-grader in one municipality gets four times more than a first-grader in another, for the same item, in the same country, in the same school year. Prilep, at 3,000 denars, sits in the lower part of that range.

The question this call opens up

If support for a first-grader is a good idea - and it is hard to argue that it is not - why does the amount depend entirely on which municipality the child happens to live in?

Measures of this type are adopted by local government using its own funds, which is precisely why they differ. But that is also why they are not demographic policy but a local judgement call - dependent on the municipal budget and on the will of whichever administration currently sits in it. The Centre for Civil Communications openly raises the prior question too: do municipalities even have the authority for such payments when each applies its own rules, amounts and categories.

Prilep did what a municipality can do. The question is why, after so many years of talking about the birth rate, support for the first morning of school still depends on who the mayor is rather than on how old the child is.