Roma inclusion is smart economics for Romania. With an ageing population and a young and growing Roma minority, Romania cannot afford leaving Roma children and youth and their families behind. Romanian Roma families today constitute a large, young, and extremely poor ethnic minority group, facing exclusion from markets and services. Investments in Roma inclusion are essential for Romania to achieve its Europe 2020 social inclusion goals. Therefore, Roma inclusion is not only a moral imperative, but also smart economics for Romania.

The socioeconomic exclusion of the Romanian Roma is the result of multiple interacting factors that result in a stark inequality of opportunities, starting early in life. In an effort to streamline policy recommendations and to highlight the most promising areas of intervention, focused on three key dimensions of exclusion: skills development, chiefly through early childhood development and basic education; earning opportunities for Roma families, and basic services and living conditions. These three dimensions underlie the challenge of achieving equality of opportunities for the Roma, both the current generation and the next generation.

Across these three areas, the recommendations for breaking the intergenerational cycle of Roma exclusion are:

  • improving the quality of social services to ensure the effectiveness of all interventions;
  • improving coordination, accountability, incentive structures, and monitoring and evaluation to deliver and track concrete results, including at a very high level;
  • combating negative stereotyping of Roma and investing in projects.

When a Roma child is born in Romania, he or she is typically born into poverty: nine out of 10 Roma live in severe material deprivation. One-half of Roma children grow up in overcrowded housing, and one-third in slum dwellings. The Roma child faces a higher chance than non-Roma peers of suffering from early malnutrition or diseases that jeopardize healthy development in the crucial first years of life.

The Roma child can typically expect to start school only at age 6 or 7, missing out on crucial preschool education, and to be out of school again as early as age 16, by which time only 29% of Roma boys and 18% of Roma girls are still found in the classroom. If the child is from a neighborhood where the majority of residents are Roma, there is a high likelihood (31% to 60%) that they will study in a segregated school or classroom for Roma. Even Roma children who attend integrated schools are likely to be treated differently by their peers and teachers, often because of prejudice. The Roma youth’s chances of completing secondary school are small, as are their chances of finding a job: Roma girls have only one in five chance to succeed in finding employment. About a third of Roma who look for a job will experience discrimination. By the time the Roma individual reaches the age of 55, they have a 54% chance of suffering from a chronic illness or health problem. On average, he or she can expect to live six years less than non-Roma peers.

Policy measures proposed are often not adequately funded. The devolvement of decision-making authority to the local level has often not been accompanied by a corresponding decentralization of the budget. Moreover, centrally imposed spending cuts to local budgets have seriously affected the autonomy of local governments, since local budgets have decreased substantially. According to a civil society monitoring report on the implementation of the National Roma Integration Strategy (NRIS), some policy measures that are not particularly aligned to the objectives of the NRIS are included in the strategy. There is a risk that these measures will burden local governments without having impacts on Roma or will result in efforts and expenditures that will not be conducive to Roma inclusion.

To download the full report, please click the link below. 

This is an adaptation of an original work by The World Bank. Responsibility for the views and opinions expressed in the adaptation rests solely with the author or authors of the adaptation and are not endorsed by The World Bank

Human Development and Sustainable Development Teams, Europe and Central Asia. 2014. Achieving Roma Inclusion in Romania: What Does It Take? © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/18663 License: Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 3.0 IGO license).

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