Description
Young Roma women have particular difficulties in accessing the labour market and in engaging in civic participation, and this project is intended to improve this access, and to promote social inclusion and gender equality. The beneficiaries will be empowered with skills to achieve these goals, integrated in a mentoring programme. Through skills development meetings, under non-formal education methodologies, knowledge and skills that lead to their personal development and inclusion in the public sphere will be built. The youths will then develop intervention projects, with the support of the project team and the mentors, which may either focus on social intervention in line with the project’s objectives, or on social entrepreneurship. A compilation of activities and employed methods will be published, facilitating dissemination, and seminars will be held, to give the young people and their work visibility in the community and in the media.
Summary of project results
40 to 60 thousand Roma live in Portugal. Marginalization and exclusion hamper access to work and to several social support systems. The National Strategy for the Integration of Roma Communities (2013-20) recognises Gender Equality (GE) as an inalienable dimension of its success. Women indeed play a key role in perpetuating values and traditions and therefore should be mobilised to have an active role as agents of change. However they face greater challenges in their gender inequality (multiple discrimination) and have little power of negotiation and affirmation within their community. Empowerment of Roma women becomes then crucial to achieve behavioural changes. 11 Roma women were empowered and trained on social entrepreneurship, out of the 13 initially involved in the training actions. The municipality of Seixal has decided to offer a location for a multi-services centre where these 11 women launched and manage together 4 projects: cafetaria, beauty salon, health centre and child artistic development centre. The project included 42 hours of training to improve writing skills, social competences useful for the labour market and social entrepreneurship; 2 residential meetings of 3 days each; 8 study visits; and the publication of a book with good practices and the methodology used (emphasising the importance of mediators). This project was awarded the prize “Miguel Portas” for inclusion and was pre-selected as a Portuguese good practice to fight women poverty by the European Institute of Gender Equality. The promoter NGO and its partners report improvements on project development and implementation, on intercultural dialogue and on gender issues.
Summary of bilateral results