The Social Development Scheme for Mining Communities - faze II (SDSMC) - is a component of "Mine Closure, Environmental and Socio -Economic Regeneration" project (2007-2010) initiated by the Minister of Economy (Official Monitor nr. 515/06.17.2005).
The project is destined to the mining sector mitigation and socio-economic regeneration within the areas affected by mines closure and has more components divided into several sub-components.
SDSMC is part of the component named "Socio-Economic Regeneration" and, compared with the pilot phase, which was conducted until 2005, the scheme is addressing to a larger area of mining communities (19 counties). The experience of the pilot phase has been used for improving the working procedures, so that the intervention responds better to the current specific problems.

RSDF is responsible to implement this component and collaborates with the Romanian Agency for Sustainable Development of Industrial Zones (RASDIZ).

The beneficiaries are not only (former) miners and their families, but also the rest of the community, affected as well by the mining sector restructuring and for which no specific actions for development have been taken.
Despite other financing alternatives (PHARE, Sapard, etc) the number of financing requests for projects (422 projects) was high, so that many projects submitted to RSDF have been rejected due to the overrun of the allocated financing capacity within the scheme.

Period :  2006-2010

General objectives:
   - socio-economic regeneration
   - citizens involvement in community development
   - increase of local capacity to initiate and administrate local projects

Beneficiaries:
   - mining communities affected by industry restructuring process (rural and urban areas)
   - disadvantaged groups (rural and urban areas)

Value of the project - U.S. $ 18,1 millions

Donors :
   - International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
   - Romanian Government

Partial results (end of 2009):
   - 132 facilitated communities
   - 152 small infrastructure works achieved (73 of them are completed)
   -  25 small businesses started (13 of them are working)
   - 18 social services provided (10 of them are providing services to beneficiars)
   - 570 members of financed communities were trained in project management (3 persons /project)
   - over 100,000 persons benefit of direct or indirect effects of the financed projects

Impact:
According to the results of external evaluations conducted in the moment of approving the first SDSMC projects (March 2008):
   - 73% of the members in the financed communities stated that the project initiated in their community was "useful or very useful".
   - RSDF is most frequently associated with attributes such as:  professionalism, transparency, consulting, open-minded, and supporting.

Contractors for work execution
List of SDMC projects


"Seeing that we had some achievements [with the projects financed by RSDF] other people wanted to start doing something. For this session there have also been submitted projects for funding. People will understand, more and more, that we need to have private initiatives and one cannot stay and wait for somebody's help...like it used to be before within the state-owned companies were everybody had a secure place to work" (beneficiary).