Insufficient projects and money from IPA for Roma Community

On June 13th, 2013, the study “Effects of IPA Funds on Roma Community" was presented in Skopje within the frames of the initiative “Making the Most of EU Funds for Roma”.

Aleksandar Krzalovski, the First executive director of MCMS and an author of the survey, presented the main findings and conclusions. According to the survey, two projects have been approved (to foreign organizations/companies for providing services) with total amount of 628,623 € that makes only 1.5 % of the component IPA 1 2008 (and 26% of sub-component for Democracy and basic rights for that year) or only 0.4 % of total IPA assets agreed by the end of 2011.

Slightly more opportunities are used by Roma NGOs/communities through EIDHR program where 3 projects were awarded for Roma, with the total amount of 186.964 € or 10% of the total budget of EIDHR for those three years. Even with the assigned projects (especially agreements upon services) it is still not clear whether the main outcomes and benefits of the projects ended up in the Roma communities.

Krzalovski talked about other parts of the survey related to the context, the status of Roma in Macedonia, policies regarding Roma and the legal and institutional framework.

Nadir Redzepi, project manager of the Open Society Foundation in Budapest, made a review of the perspectives of IPA funds for Roma. He emphasized that the survey answers the question how many funds are being distributed but it doesn’t answers why the number of projects and financial assets are such small. Apart from this, Redzepi pointed out another problem. There are projects that are being funded of different sources, such as, for example the state institutions, but according to him, there is a lack of synergy and synchronizations in the usage of the assets. He beleives that the civic sector should show more activities to get EU funds, which requires bigger responsibility in return.

After the introductory presentations there was a discussion. The participants that were representatives of the state governmental institutions shared their views for the intervention of the state in improving the life and welfare of Roma community. They talked about the infrastructural projects in the education and the projects aiming to motivate youngster to get engage in the educational processes. Part of the notes were about the slow procedures of EU which are the reason that some of the activities planned for 2006 are being implemented in 2013 when they now might not be useful and even irrelevant. Elvis Ali from the EU Delegation believes that some additional efforts should be made for widening and extending the research with the information for other funded projects. Part of the discussion focused on revision of the Roma Strategy, adopted in 2004 and revision of the Action Plans as well. The representatives of the NVO sector were interested in finding out why their applications given to the open public calls for IPA funds were not granted, especially knowing the bad financial condition they are in.

The survey made a clearer picture of how much of EU’s IPA fund end up in Roma community in Macedonia, but opened many additional question that should be answered in the future.