The Priority Intervention Program is placed within the broader context of the Social Inclusion Decade and is one of the 4 components of the Social Inclusion Project, being a Governmental project financed by a loan from the World Bank (Official Monitor 172/2009).
On the basis of the successful recipes of the previous projects but introducing some novelty items as well, RSDF designed the program to maximize the expected impact: promotion of an integrated perspective over the local development by financing integrated projects and mobilization of interested local actors.
An integrated project includes minimum two components, one related to infrastructure and the other related to social services. Thus, a Roma community has to make more that one choice from the multitude of needs and difficulties it's facing having also the opportunity to ask for support to design other projects financed from European funds for those problems, which cannot be solved by the Program.
The differences in approaching the problems imposed some institutional changes, RSDF adapting its organizational structure by creating an Office for Roma communities.
PIP is destined to the Roma communities out of which 81% within rural areas.
Period - 2006-2011
General objectives:
- reducing poverty and promoting social inclusion in the poorest 100 Roma communities
Beneficiaries:
- poor Roma communities
Value of the project - EUR 15,4 millions
Donors:
- International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
- Romanian Government
Partial results (end of 2009):
- 128 facilitated communities
- 98 integrated projects (submitted by municipalities, in partnership with communities representatives and NGO's and include small infrastructure and social services works) in progress to be financed
- 3 integrated projects completed
- 2 projects in progress of contracting
- 260 persons (members of financed Roma communities, representatives of partnership municipalities and NGO's) were trained in project management
List of PIP contracts
Impact:
In process to be evaluated
Stories shared by facilitators:
" At the beginning of the facilitating we met some difficulties to mobilize the community because they were rather involved in agricultural works or, they were preoccupied to take care of their children and aged people. I've worked with difficulty with the community members because of their poverty (they have nothing to clothe on) on one hand, and because of their trustfulness, on the other hand. Somebody said, at the beginning of facilitating: << many people have come here and left without giving any help>>.
In spite of the obstacles, I finally managed to change the mentality of the Roma community and local representatives and we finalized what we wanted."
"People understood that many of their problems can be solved if they get involved. They understood that, if they get organized, they have more influence towards the administrative institutions. They were repented, each time they met, that they didn't study and they promised to let their children to go to school. Even the children who have abandoned school are eager to build a new center, to go there and learn how to write and read. We asked one 9 years old kid: <<Why don't you go to school? >> and he answered: <<I don't have any clothes, neither room left in the house because we are 7 brothers and sisters, but I promise to go to the new center. I can hardly wait to! >>".
