Description:
The Roma Early Childhood Inclusion Project is sponsored and managed by the Roma Education Fund, the Open Society Foundations and UNICEF. Its purpose is to gather data and information about the inclusion of young Roma children in the early childhood services of four Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries: the Czech Republic, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Romania.
For each country, a national Roma Early Childhood Inclusion Report will be researched and written by national experts in the fields of early childhood and Roma inclusion. These RECI Reports will identify the priority early childhood policy issues and concerns in respect of Roma families and children. They will be grounded in normative values (e.g. the basic rights of children and minority groups as outlined in the UN Conventions and EU Directive 2000/73 of 29 June 2007), in agreed early childhood research positions on the strategies to be adopted in supporting excluded families and children (e.g. the need to provide strong government leadership and funding; the need to involve all the major stakeholders, especially the target group and so on) and in data-based investigation. The Reports will place a strong emphasis on progress achieved and on innovative programmes that can be generalised to benefit all countries. Each report will be examined for its conformity to the Report Format and validated through stakeholder interviews and a national meeting of all the stakeholders, including government representatives and international experts. The final chapter of each national report will be written after the national consultation meeting. Illustrative vignettes documenting the experiences of young Roma children and their families, as well as innovative practices and programs, will be embedded throughout the final reports.
Three additional outputs from the Project are also proposed:
- A Content Analysis of Early Childhood Curricula that are used widely in children’s services in each country, with special attention given to the support provided in national curricula to minority family values, culture and knowledge;
- A synthetic Final Report (The Early Inclusion of Young Roma Children in Four CEE Countries)written by the senior consultant. This report will be validated at a one-day review meeting bringing together the country authors, Roma representatives and government officials.
- A comparative Fact Sheet, based on the Final Report, will provide a data snapshot of the inclusion/exclusion of young Roma children in the four countries, using the major indicators that affect the life chances of children.
The RECI project was initiated in 2009.