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Description
The members of the Roma community cannot exercise fully their education, health and employment rights due to systemic, structural and practical barriers. Successful boosting of parenting capacity considerably improves parents’ efficiency and self-confidence. I CAN is an innovation, which applies an integrated approach to meet the community needs, provides strong arguments in favour of empowerment of vulnerable communities and improves access to services; offers useful pragmatic solutions for public policies for the development of human resources in the country; reinforces the role of the civil sector in offering flexible and efficient evidence-based programmes to address the community needs. I CAN helps build a positive image and boost respect for the Norwegian programmes for support of families and children. The project will be implemented in Faculteta Neighbourhood in Sofia, the second largest Roma neighbourhood in Bulgaria. The project aims at developing further a programme for early childhood education and care and gathering empirical evidence of its immediate impact on child care, children‘s cognitive development and academic performance as well as parents’ values and social skills and other fields of parents’ social life, namely employment and civic involvement. I CAN has an advisory body, Council of Mothers, which safeguards principles of cultural tolerance and continuity of programme implementation. 168 parents and at least 84 children aged 0-5 will benefit from I CAN. 20 mothers having a prominent place in the community will attend a leadership programme for support of early childhood development in the Roma community. The project plans to hold offline and online campaigns targeted at parents, employers, social and health service providers and professional organizations, institutions and municipal administrations.