In the past 20 years, Roma communities across Europe have seen very few improvements to their living situation, even though many public and private, international, and national funding programmes were aimed at Roma inclusion and empowerment. One of the reasons for the lack of success of such funding is the application of a top-down approach that does not consider the realities and voices of Roma at the grassroots level and comes with a heavy administrative burden.

All evaluations of the last EU Framework for National Roma Integration acknowledged that Roma communities needed to be involved in project design, implementation, and evaluation to bring about change. This now needs to be translated into better funding programmes and regulations of public and private donors, including using more national resources for smaller projects, a prioritisation of bottom-up approaches, and more support for Community-Led Local Development (CLLD).

With this event, we aim to raise donors’ awareness of the importance to give more support to bottom-up approaches, to finally improve the living situation of Roma communities on local level

Objectives

The event will serve to launch ERGO Network’s new Analysis of funding for bottom-up approaches to Roma inclusion, shedding light on the importance of bottom-up approaches and assessing funding programmes targeted at Roma inclusion. The main findings and recommendations aim to kick-start a debate with policy makers, donors, and civil society on how to design more effective funding programmes that can lead to a real change for local Roma communities.

The event and report has received financial support in the framework of the project "New solutions to old problems". The project “New solutions to old problems – exchange of new type of approaches in the field of Roma integration” is funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Regional Cooperation.