In addition to ongoing issues facing civil and public service in Kosovo, a long-standing challenge has been the absence of human resources management reports. Despite their significance in providing essential data in this area, these reports had not been published for several years. Beyond promoting and ensuring accountability and transparency, the preparation and publication of the report is also a legal obligation since 2019.

Following a period of anticipation, in September 2025, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) published the Human Resources Management Report for 2024 (hereinafter: report), prepared by the Department for Management of Public Officials (DMPO), based on the SIGMA/OECD methodology. Although published in 2025 the report includes data from 2022-2024, and explains while making the difference to the legal changes of September 2023.

Regarding general statistics, the number of public officials is 83,387, of which 54% are men and 46% are women. Regarding the number of civil servants, the total number is 15,172, of which 58% are men and 42% are women. In both cases, it turns out that the majority of the total number of officials in public institutions are men. Although the difference is moderate, the same shifts significantly when it comes to the management levels of all public institutions, including independent ones. In these positions, women hold only 23% of senior management positions, 26% of middle management and 34% in lower management positions, which is considerably lower compared to men.

The data on minorities show that only 4.7% of employees in civil service are from the Serb community. The Turkish community is 0.8%, the same as the Bosniak community, while other communities make up 0.45%. As for the representation of persons with disabilities, 127 are employed in the civil service. The report does not contain disaggregated information on public service.

Regarding recruitment in the civil service, the report found that 1638 competitions were announced in 2024, followed by 1379 in 2023, and 1504 in 2022. Although the report notes an increase in vacancies, this does not necessarily correspond to a proportional increase of appointments. On the other hand, the report shows that in the civil service in 2024 there were 2980 vacant positions. Based on the monitoring of the CorrWatch initiative, the reasons for the high number of vacant positions are several, including failure to publish the competitions, lack of interested applicants, low number of applications fulfilling the criteria, and and legal violations during the procedures that lead to cancellation of recruitment processes. According to the report, the average duration for the development of a recruitment procedure in 2024 was 116.2 days. However, when compared to the deadlines stipulated in the current regulation, this duration is considered inefficient.

A huge concern, noted in this report as well, is the high number of senior management positions operated with acting officials, which sums up to 72% of senior positions in 2024. CorrWatch initiative has continuously warned about the risk associated to this dangerous practice, where acting appointments were dominant across nearly all management levels for four years. Moreover, the deadlines set by law for holding these positions (at that time 1 year), have been exceeded in some cases and consequently, any decision of these acting officials is illegal beyond this deadline. The report does not contain data on the state of acting officials in the other two managerial levels, which according to the report, is lacking due to failure to finalize the internal regulations and job classification processes.  However, this does not stand as an argument since there are other ways to collect information, such as directly from institutions since human resources units have the data available.

In addition to the abovementioned data, the report also contains information on salaries, providing an update on the processes of internal organization and job classification. According to the report, 86% of ministries and 51% of agencies have approved internal organization regulations. On the other hand, in practice, 63% of ministries and only 37% of agencies have completed their internal restructuring process, which is only 43% of the total institutions that have completed this process. Although efforts have been intensified in the last year, this remains insufficient, given that more than 4 years have passed since the government reorganization, as per the Law on Organization and Functioning of State Administration and Independent Agencies. On the other hand, job classification- a process vital to precede the law on salaries – was significantly delayed.

Performance evaluation is also another significant aspect frequently discussed in the public, mostly considered formal rather than impactful. According to the report, 81.06% of civil servants meet expectations, 15.04% exceed expectations, while 1.92% have performance below the required level. In 2024, the performance evaluation was done through the Human Resources Management Information System (HRMIS), although not all civil servants were evaluated through this system. In the future, the Ministry should ensure that the evaluation process should be carried out through HRMIS.

After years of stagnation in reports, this document is welcomed as a necessary overview of the current state of public service human resource management, and most importantly, as a step towards enhanced institutional transparency. In terms of its quality, it is important to emphasize that data collection needs to be further improved, using different collection methods and accuracy, including all categories. This because in certain cases, there is data only for the civil service and not the public service.

Nevertheless, the data presented in the report should serve as a foundation for institutional reforms and future commitment to a results-oriented approach in addressing systemic issues identified within the public institutions.