Housing and reconstruction of housing units, economic inclusion of Roma families and improvement of the capacity of 14 Roma associations in municipalities across the country are some of the goals to be achieved through the project “Roma Action”, which is the first of this size to be carried out in BiH.
The project “Roma Action (RA) – Support of socio-economic inclusion of Roma population in BiH through provision of housing and socio-economic measures with proactive participation of local authorities and other local stakeholders”, which will be implemented in the next 22 months in 14 municipalities of BiH, was officially launched on 2 October at a conference in Sarajevo.
“This project is devoted to the general social progress and economic inclusion of Roma. The project is being implemented all over Europe, including the countries of the Western Balkans. This type of inclusion is very important for the EU and certainly the priority is to improve the living conditions of Roma. This is a really important area for the EU. The plan is also to organise another conference early next year, where we will basically analyse the progress made in the last year and a half in BiH” said Dr. Renzo Daviddi, Deputy Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The municipalities in which the project will be implemented are: Tuzla, Lukavac, Gracanica, Novo Sarajevo, Novi Grad, Centar Sarajevo, Zenica, Bihac, Krupa, Gornji Vakuf/ Uskoplje, Vukosavlje, Zvornik and Bijeljina.
„The BiH Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees since 2009 has continuously allocated around 3 million marks from the budget for the Roma population in the areas of housing, health care, education and employment. Up to this point we have provided around 12 million marks. However, we are aware that this is still not enough. We cooperate with international organizations, primarily with the European Commission, UNHCR and OSCE on all these projects. In recognition to BiH, our country will chair the Decade of Roma from June 2014 to June 2015. Message we want to send is that in all of these projects we include Roma representatives, all in order to make symbiosis and synthesis larger and better” said Damir Ljubic, BiH Minister of Human Rights and Refugees.
The Project is implemented by Hilfswerk Austria International, in partnership with Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund Deutschland e.V (ASB) and Kali Sara – Crna Sara Association.
Overall value of the project is around 3 million Euro, for which the EU provided 2,5 million Euro.
