Eight months after launching an anti-poverty package, the government has presented its main achievements.
At 40%, Romania's poverty and social exclusion rate is among the highest in the European Union, according to Eurostat. In February, the government launched a plan to fight poverty consisting of 47 different measures that reflect an integrated approach to all the problems vulnerable individuals and families may be facing. Most of these measures target children. In Romania, more than 1.7 million children live in poverty, mostly in the country's rural areas.
Eight months after launching the anti-poverty package, the government has presented the main achievements of the programme and the measures to be taken in the coming period. Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos has said that in Romania, poverty is caused by corruption and the way in which public resources are allocated:
"Unless we overcome the behaviour that favours corruption, we won't be able to eradicate poverty. Our efforts were mainly aimed at unblocking certain measures that already existed but which for various reasons had not been implemented. We took a series of measures to simplify things, we linked institutions and people with responsibilities in these areas that had been working individually and had not been coordinated with each other. We also used different sources of funding, such as the state budget, European funds and other sources that had the same target but were inefficient when employed on their own. We started with the idea that once such actions are put in motion, they would irreversibly propagate provided they are applied conscientiously and rigorously. Apart from what the state itself can do, it is also important to find the most efficient ways to work together with civil society to implement these measures and follow up on them."
In Romania, one in three children lives in persistent poverty. While there are no official statistics, it is estimated that more than 150,000 young people over the age of 14 do not have identity papers. The school dropout rate in Romania is also quite high, with one in five children leaving school after the age of eighteen. Prime minister Dacian Ciolos once again:
"There are still children who don't have identity documents. So we have come up with measures enabling each child to obtain them. We have also taken measures to prevent school dropout, which includes dealing with the problem of pre-school integration. In this particular case we used a programme that was already working very well in the non-governmental environment and which we have adopted. We realised that many children don't go to school because they don't have clothes to wear and nothing to put in their lunchboxes. To address this, we turned to programmes that already existed on the provision of free fruit and meals in school, programmes that are not ready to be implemented on a large scale. We are currently carrying out a pilot programme to provide free hot meals which can form the basis for an after-school programme later on."
To stimulate the labour market and help job seekers, starting on December 1st, companies hiring young graduates or unemployed people will receive a subsidy of 900 lei, up from 500 lei. Also, unemployed people who have to travel more than 50 km for work and have to relocate will benefit from a relocation allowance of 12,500 lei. Education minister Mircea Dumitru has presented a series of measures in the field of education, emphasising that a number of "strategic projects" are in the pipeline for the end of the year:
"A national programme to help poor families buy school materials for their children has been extended. This package will be more consistent starting next school year and may also be available for pre-school children. We would like to launch a public debate on curricula reforms for compulsory education, for secondary education. [...] For all these social measures to work in education we need well-prepared and well-motivated teachers, so we need better training for future teachers. Last but not least, as an outcome of our fight against fraud and corruption, we are also launching a public debate on the methodology for the assessment of doctoral schools. In a not too distant future, we also hope to begin a nationwide process to assess doctoral schools, so that universities may be able to provide quality education when it comes to training highly-skilled and high performing workforce."
Fighting poverty is a priority of public policies, and economic growth should benefit everyone, said the finance minister Anca Dragu:
"We have managed to ensure funding for new programmes to get children in pre-school education and provide free fruit in schools. A programme I am very fond of that which seeks to provide free hot meals in schools, in which I became personally involved. We have allocated 2.5 billion lei for this programme. It's not cheap, but it is essential in our fight against poverty and in ensuring the right education of young people and their future in Romania. At the beginning of the year we allocated 1.2 billion lei for the rehabilitation of schools. In the case of vocational training, we plan to come up with a package of tax measures to support entrepreneurs willing to fund vocational training. Throughout the year we have provided funds for these projects in education and healthcare and for fighting poverty. During the latest budget adjustment in August we managed to find supplementary sources of funding and allocated 570 million lei to healthcare, over one billion lei to education and 2.8 billion lei for social assistance."
Speaking about the government's anti-poverty plan, the health minister Vlad Vociulescu highlighted the relationship between poverty and healthcare, underlining that poverty is to blame for bad nutrition, which eventually leads to illness. People eat cheap foodstuffs containing a lot of additives because they don't have money, and this leads to serious health conditions, including cancer. One of the achievements of the healthcare ministry is the launch of a medical caravan with Norwegian funding, with doctors and nurses travelling to isolated villages across the country to provide free medical services. They ministry is also working on a vaccination bill to grant social incentives to families who don't have their children vaccinated because they don't have the money.
To implement the anti-poverty package, Romania has at its disposal more than 572 million euros out of the European Regional Development Fund for the 2014-2020 period available to projects focusing on social inclusion and the reduction of poverty.
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