Every Roma child in kindergarten
Fact sheet
Initiative “Every Roma child in kindergarten” (Year I)
The Observatory for Children’s Rights, the Young Women’s Christian Association of Albania (YWCA), the Children’s Human Rights Centre of Albania (CRCA), in cooperation with UNICEF-Albania, are implementing the initiative “Every Roma Child in Kindergarten”, since October 2013. This project is supported by the Swiss Cooperation Office in Albania and the Austrian Development Cooperation.
Implementation of this initiative in each region and area of the country, among others, has succeeded to integrate many Roma children in kindergarten; Even that a lot of challenges and difficulties are faced, this initiative has resulted in total with 981 Roma children in kindergarten (from a total of 1,246 [1]) or 79%, by the end of school year 2013-2014 and beginning of 2014-2015.
As a result of implementation of the project “Each Roma Children in Kindergarten”, number of Roma children in kindergarten in national level, is increased with 409 children registered or 33% more.
Based on study organized by UNICEF in 2011, is made public that 369 from 1079 Roma children in total, or 36% registered in kindergarten in national level (http://www.sidalbania.org/romacom.html).
[1] Roma Census 2014, Soros Albania.
Other successes achieved by the implementation of this initiative in its first year of implementation (October 2013 – October 2014), are 184 Roma children are vaccinated, 44 children registered on Civil registration system and 74 children (of various ages) registered in compulsory education at the national level.
The whole process of inclusion of Roma children in kindergarten had a special attention to the community and parents. During this first year of project implementation, 2,162 parents of Roma community are contacted and shared with them information about the importance of devoted attention and behavior with their children during their early childhood development.
