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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.
Summary of project results
Due to systemic structural and practical obstacles, people from the Roma community cannot fully exercise their rights (education, health, employment). Successfully increasing the capacity of Roma parents significantly improves their self-esteem and empowers them to participate equally in mainstream services. The project’s objective was to further develop a programme in a Roma community called the Model for Early Education, Care and Active Participation (MOGA) and to gather empirical evidence on its immediate impact on the quality of childcare, cognitive development and educational achievement, as well as on parents'' value orientations and social skills and on other areas of their social expression - employment and civic participation.
184 parents and 92 children aged 0-5 benefited from MOGA. 20 active mothers from the community participated in a leadership programme to support early childhood development (ECD) in a Roma community and reached an additional 415 mothers with information. Trained mother leaders are active on social media and offline. Targeted off- and online campaigns were conducted targeting parents, employers, social and health service providers and professional organizations, institutions and municipal administrations. The project contributed to increasing the capacity of HESED''s team in providing quality services to support ECD by conducting 3 trainings by specialists: (1) Training on first aid for infants and children up to 8 years of age; (2) Training on the impact of technology on ECD; and (3) Training on the MGS method - developing social skills through movement.
MOGA has an advisory body, the Mothers'' Council, which ensures the principles of cultural tolerance and continuity in programme implementation.
Through its advocacy work, MOGA was able to attract positive attention from people in the institutional and NGO sectors. This is a prerequisite for good partnerships with organisations and ensures sustainability of services.
The results of the study show that the programme has a clear impact on children''s school readiness. The comparative analysis of the SER (state educational requirements) scores of the children attending the Day Care and Education for Children service from the entry and exit levels of the study shows that systematic and targeted work with the children compensates for the neglect in terms of their school readiness, such as their achievement in each of the 5 educational domains: Bulgarian language, mathematics, orientation in the social world and orientation in nature meet the age-appropriate SER. The comparative analysis of the DAYC results shows that children make significant progress in all components of speech development (receptive speech, expressive speech and communication skills) and social emotional development. Optimistically, the children meet the norms for 4 years of age and indicators that correspond to the average for the general population, which aligns their achievements with those of their peers and gives grounds for optimistic expectations about the successful school adaptation of children.
The programme influences the personality structure and value priorities of parents and they begin to rate the importance of education higher in their hierarchy of priorities. MOGA has an impact on parents who are committed to the programme for the long term. The mothers who participated in the leadership development training have shown significant activity in the field and in social networks and are natural conduits of MOGA values. The project team made contacts with employers who recognized MOGA as a programme that could be a successful intermediary between them and the community workforce. The programme works to reduce discrimination against Roma workers in the workplace and improve access to the labour market. The programme is clearly improving access to rights and services for Roma families.