Roma Education Initiative Final Report

The Open Society Education Support Program (ESP) has released the Roma Education Initiative (REI) Final Report. REI aimed to tackle the unacceptable educational conditions for Roma children in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe by increasing national programming; mobilizing national agendas and resources; and advocating strongly and consistently for systemic and policy changes that work against segregation and racial discrimination, and for high-quality educational provision for Roma children. REI was implemented from 2002 to 2005.

The Roma Education Initiative was designed to work on both the international and national levels, and included grantmaking and technical assistance functions. Though all projects were aligned with the overall REI goals and principles, and implemented the comprehensive approach methodology, each project was unique, based on the situation and context of each country. From its inception in 2002, REI funded seven national-level projects in Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In addition, REI provided support to other national efforts focused on Roma education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo, through technical assistance and/or inclusion of implementing teams in international events.

REI did not envisage a centralized evaluation due to the variation in implementation and timeframes of projects; difficulties over the comparability of data would not have made that possible. Instead, REI relied mostly on national-level external evaluation of projects to provide data necessary to document its achievements. Though some data was collected centrally, the final report draws primarily from these national-level external evaluations, thus combining a cluster evaluation and multisite evaluation approach.

The final report and executive summary are available in PDF format; the national-level evaluations are available on the REI website.