Over the course of a seven-year secondary school scholarship program in Vojvodina, the Roma Education Fund brought about a reduction in the dropout rate of participating Romani high school students from 26 to four percent. Now the Roma Education Fund is poised to extend the program across all of Serbia’s regions.
Over the course of a seven-year secondary school scholarship program in Vojvodina, the Roma Education Fund brought about a reduction in the dropout rate of participating Romani high school students from 26 to four percent. Now the Roma Education Fund is poised to extend the program across all of Serbia’s regions.
Early this year the Roma Education Fund opened a branch office in Serbia in order to enable REF to participate more robustly in policy dialogues, initiatives and programs related to Roma in Serbia as part of a strategy to secure European funding in order to bring its proven models and policies on Roma inclusion to the Serbian school system.
With the support of the European Commission’s Instruments for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA), the Serbian branch office of the Roma Education Fund, the OSCE Mission to the Republic of Serbia and and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development (MoESTD) are implementing a 20-month mentoring and scholarship program for Roma high school students in all of Serbia. This program is one of the component of the project “We are Here Together – European Support for Roma Inclusion,” which aims to decrease the dropout rate among the most vulnerable Roma students and to support them through a set of different institutional and programmatic support tools (“Technical Assistance for Enforcement of the Project Idea of the Government of the Republic of Serbia in the Sphere of Social Development,” IPA 2012 (Measures 1 to 5)).
For the purpose of the implementation of “Technical Support to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development in Establishing and Strengthening the Program for Prevention of Dropouts of Secondary School Roma Pupils”, the MoESTD signed a Memorandum of Understanding with OSCE Mission to the Republic of Serbia and Roma Education Fund on February 4, 2014. This Memorandum of Understanding defines the main principals of collaboration and ensures that REF methodology will be applied. Under the frame of this project REF is providing technical assistance to the MoESTD in the introduction and strengthening of the dropout prevention program and setting up the monitoring mechanism for the dropout prevention beneficiaries, including the database, and school-based senior mentor support network. REF is also in charge of organizing promotional campaigns within the Roma community and for development of training programs for mentors, educational advisors and school inclusive teams as envisaged under the Project.
Furthermore, the Serbian MoESTD has established a Working Group that is working closely with REF Project Team in defining the selection criteria of students and mentors and will participate in the selection of students and mentors, and give its contribution when defining training programs. It also aims to harmonize the work of the Serbian government and implementing organizations (REF, OSCE) and to ensure official platform for policy dialogue.
This nationwide project is built on the experiences gained from Autonomous Province Vojvodina’s scholarship program. The Roma Education Fund and the Provincial Secretariat for Education, Administration and National Communities have successfully implemented the project “Inclusion of Roma Pupils into Secondary Schools in the AP of Vojvodina.” Thanks to this project, over a period of seven school years, a total of 1,643 scholarships were granted to secondary school Roma pupils in the territory of AP Vojvodina, while the overall success of Roma pupils has also been improved. One of the more important results is a reduced dropout rate of Roma pupils from the education system, so over the course of seven years of implementation of the Project the average dropout rate level of pupils stood at 4.24 percent, which represents an exceptional result, taking into consideration that before the beginning of implementation of the Project the dropout rate among Roma pupils stood at 26 percent per year.
The project “We are Here Together – European Support for Roma Inclusion,” financed by the European Union, actually represents a continuation of this successful initiative, which will be implemented as of school year 2014/15 in the whole territory of the Republic of Serbia.
The involvement of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (MoESTD) now allows for the nationwide expansion of REF’s secondary school scholarship model with technical support of OSCE Mission to the Republic of Serbia and the Roma Education Fund. The project anticipates reaching some 1,000 Roma secondary school students in Serbia to receive scholarships in order to keep them enrolled in school, with the goal of completing their studies and making further reductions to dropout rates of Romani students in Serbia. Aside from the above, it is also planned for the project team to, jointly with the MoESTD, provide educational support in the form of individual and group mentor support to Romani pupils which do not meet criteria for the state scholarship program in the whole territory of the Republic of Serbia.
The call will soon be available for Romani high school students living in Serbia.
Recent press on REF programs in Serbia include:
http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/srbija.73.html:502260-Sve-manje-vojvodjanskih-Roma-odustaje-od-skole
http://www.rtv.rs/sr_lat/vojvodina/novi-sad/vise-od-1.600-stipendije-za-romske-djake_505032.html
http://www.puma.vojvodina.gov.rs/etext.php?ID_mat=1664&PHPSESSID=aqsno7qe5rktr5nqqcih2mri63
For more information, please contact:
Roma Education Fund
Representative Office in the Republic of Serbia
Zahumska 14, Office Nr. 415
11000 Belgrade, Serbia
