Ploiesti City, Romania was the venue of 17 July for a workshop organized by the European Public Health Alliance to strengthen the capacity of Roma health and school mediators to better advocate for Health and Early Childhood Development in the next National Roma Integration Strategy (NRIS).
The 30 participants present discussed the following topics:
The EU Roma Framework external evaluation
The 32 coordinated inputs provided by EPHA for the external evaluation of the Framework were presented, as well as EPHA’s 2017 recommendations on the implementation of the NRIS in Romania following the public consultation on the mid-term evaluation of the EU’s Roma Framework.. Many of the participants contributed to the scoping survey.
The European Platform for Roma Inclusion
For the first time in its 12 editions, the platform will address health as one of its two main topics. The participants had the chance to make recommendations for which topics should be addressed during the Platform on 8-9 October in Brussels.
The analysis of the Health and Education pillar of the National Roma Integration Strategy
The participants carried out a detailed analysis of the strategy, highlighting the need to invest more in early childhood development and access to health services. They concluded that while the strategy itself is an important recognition of the need for the EU to work on Roma inclusion, it has almost no effectiveness on the ground because of the lack of financial support to implement it at local level.
Participants proposed to develop a set of recommendations for the forthcoming Romanian presidency of the Council of the European Union, including an event to discuss how the proposals of the next NRIS after 2020 could become more binding on EU Member States.
Marius Tudor
Roma Health Project Manager
