Local development – Page 4

Stakeholder Workshop ‘Building-up quality of life in the local area’

Stakeholder Workshop ‘Building-up quality of life in the local area’

On May 16 Eurofound organized a stakeholder meeting on the topic ‘Building-up quality of life in the local area’. Dr. Ileana Rotaru from Nevo Parudimos and ERGO member presented the perspective of Social hubs in rural Europe: social inclusion and Roma integration.

Between 2017 and 2020 Eurofound will carry-out exploratory research on ways to build up quality of life in the local area, whether urban or rural. In particular, it seeks to investigate two questions: a) what physical and social factors in the local area are of particular importance for people’s quality of life? and b) what can be learned from initiatives to enhance quality of life in the local area?

Our input to the meeting was that Roma communities cannot be forgotten when the ‘local dimensions’ of quality of life is targeted in this project. We stressed the necessity of including Roma in different types of initiatives and policies aiming to improve quality of life.

Present at the meeting were Mr. Tadas Leonikas from Eurofund, Eurofound Research Manager Mr. Hans Dubois, different stakeholders from EU state members and municipalities and European Commission representatives: DG EMPL (Unit: Modernisation of Social Protection Systems), DG SANTE (Unit: Health determinants and inequality) and from DG REGIO (Unit: Inclusive Growth, Urban and Territorial Development).

Roma Regional Meeting on Roma community development in Romania

Roma Regional Meeting on Roma community development in Romania

Nevo Parudimos, as a member of ERGO Network, organized a working meeting on the 14th of September in Timisoara on the theme of „Local Development Strategies and the role of Roma NGO’s in their implementation”.At the meeting participated Roma NGO’s from 3 counties of the Western Region of Romania (8 representatives). They expressed their interest in collaborating with the Local Action Groups (LAGs) management team in order to apply for the calls on the Strategies’ social measures targeting the Roma communities. They underlined the need for special training in order to be able to apply for LAGs call and to be built their capacity of implementing these projects as the need for active measures is well-known and could be a priority in certain situations. The Comunity Local Led Development process was explained by the Nevo Parudioms’team and the LAG’s activity within their area of interest (the LAGs where the Roma NGO’s have their activity).

The participants’ NGOs have also shown their interest and commitment to attend and be involved within Roma Forum platform and activities.

More info about Nevo Parudioms here.

Reality check on Roma local development in Hungary

Reality check on Roma local development in Hungary

One of the main objectives of ERGO Network is to create strong National Roma Working Groups (NRWG) in France, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovakia. The NRWG aim to be strong coalitions where Roma stakeholders, leaders and community-based organizations can connect and exert bottom-up pressure on administrations in order to take positive action to address Roma exclusion.

In Hungary, our member Butterfly Development has organised the 2nd meeting of the NRWG on 13-14 September in the form of a 2-day study trip with accompanying workshop in the Nord-East part of Hungary.

The main objective of the event – organised in close collaboration with the Alliance of the Spokespersons of Roma Minorities of Nógrád County – was to provide a platform for developing appropriate working relations between the local decision makers, Roma organisations and pro-Roma civil organisations, by means of sharing and evaluating good practices of local development with and for Roma communities in Nógrád County. The participating Mayors and the representatives of their selected collaborators from Roma civil organisation were invited from the Nord-East region, i.e. from Nógrád, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén and Szabolcs-Szatmár counties. The State Secretary being responsible for social and Roma inclusion also attended the second day of the meeting, together with the Catholic Bishop of the Nógrád County.

The participants of the NRWG meeting visited two small settlements suffering from multiple disadvantages, namely Nagybárkány and Varsány, to collect personal practical experiences about the effects of complex local development resulting in new types of institutions and services or new local employment opportunities built on local traditions (e.g. folk art or agricultural roots) based on public work. The accompanying workshop provided an effective opportunity for brainstorming and summarizing the main objectives of necessary further development, the necessary collaborators to achieve them and the necessary actions. The participants firmly committed themselves to continue their common work and to extend the scope of activity of this network. Some Mayors already offered to host the next NRWG meeting and share their good practices.

For more information and pictures read here

Social inclusion of Roma in rural areas through CLLD process

Social inclusion of Roma in rural areas through CLLD process

Better integration of Roma people in rural areas is not only a social, but also a demographic and economic issue. The European Roma Grassroots Organization (ERGO Network) has been working actively to use bottom-up/ partnership-based approaches (such as LEADER/CLLD) as a tool to engage Roma people more actively in shaping the future of their rural areas.

CLLD can offer opportunities for Roma communities to participate in developing and implementing Local Development Strategies (LDSs). From case studies we conducted in 2014[1], however, we know that Roma involvement is not obvious. Also, the monitoring and evaluation of LDSs mostly takes a narrow quantitative approach, neglects the perspectives of beneficiaries and fails to analyse why Roma communities very often hardly benefit from them.

ERGO Network’s Quality Audit addresses these shortcomings. The Quality Audit is a tool to involve Roma communities in the monitoring of CLLD, which at the same time strengthens their voice in the process, and to evaluate the quality of LDSs, both in terms of participation and results. The Quality Audit has two aims:

To assess the quality of CLLD local development strategies;
To empower local groups and create/strengthen accountability mechanisms at local level.

The Quality Audit provides data for shadow monitoring and – as it is a multi-year effort – also the opportunity to follow the process from start to finish. It will thus allow us to formulate recommendations for the next programming period.

Secondly, the Quality Audit strengthens the position of Roma communities at local level and empowers local activists. It introduces a comparative measure for how Local Action Groups (LAGs) perform in each phase of the CLLD process. By sharing the outcomes, activists and local NGOs stand stronger in their negotiations or their participation in the CLLD process. Conducting the QA also enhances the knowledge of communities and activists of the process, which further strengthens their position. The QA also evaluates LAGs and LDSs against some of the formal criteria set for CLLD by the European Commission: it thus strengthens accountability mechanisms at local level.

The Quality Audit exists alongside the ERGO Network Local Scorecard: this is an online tool where local activists can rate how well their locality is doing in terms of Roma inclusion. The QA is a much more in-depth evaluation focusing specifically on CLLD, providing a deeper level of analysis. The tools are complementary however; activists conducting the QA can also use the Local Scorecard – which gives a less in-depth, but also more general picture of the state of Roma integration in their locality.

The first synthesis report of the Quality Audit in 2016 will soon be published by ERGO Network.

Here you can download overviews of the participating organizations: