The implementation of the anti-poverty package

Eight months after launching an anti-poverty package, the government has presented its main achievements.

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România Internațional, 26.10.2016, 13:32

At 40%, Romania’s
poverty and social exclusion rate is among the highest in the European Union,
according to Eurostat. In February, the government launched a plan to fight
poverty consisting of 47 different measures that reflect an integrated approach
to all the problems vulnerable individuals and families may be facing. Most of
these measures target children. In Romania, more than 1.7 million children live
in poverty, mostly in the country’s rural areas.

Eight months after
launching the anti-poverty package, the government has presented the main
achievements of the programme and the measures to be taken in the coming
period. Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos has said that in Romania, poverty is
caused by corruption and the way in which public resources are allocated:

Unless we
overcome the behaviour that favours corruption, we won’t be able to eradicate
poverty. Our efforts were mainly aimed at unblocking certain measures that
already existed but which for various reasons had not been implemented. We took
a series of measures to simplify things, we linked institutions and people with
responsibilities in these areas that had been working individually and had not
been coordinated with each other. We also used different sources of funding,
such as the state budget, European funds and other sources that had the same
target but were inefficient when employed on their own. We started with the
idea that once such actions are put in motion, they would irreversibly
propagate provided they are applied conscientiously and rigorously. Apart from
what the state itself can do, it is also important to find the most efficient
ways to work together with civil society to implement these measures and follow
up on them.

In Romania,
one in three children lives in persistent poverty. While there are no official
statistics, it is estimated that more than 150,000 young people over the age of
14 do not have identity papers. The school dropout rate in Romania is also
quite high, with one in five children leaving school after the age of
eighteen. Prime minister Dacian Ciolos
once again:

There are
still children who don’t have identity documents. So we have come up with
measures enabling each child to obtain them. We have also taken measures to
prevent school dropout, which includes dealing with the problem of pre-school
integration. In this particular case we used a programme that was already
working very well in the non-governmental environment and which we have
adopted. We realised that many children don’t go to school because they don’t
have clothes to wear and nothing to put in their lunchboxes. To address this,
we turned to programmes that already existed on the provision of free fruit and
meals in school, programmes that are not ready to be implemented on a large
scale. We are currently carrying out a pilot programme to provide free hot
meals which can form the basis for an after-school programme later on.

To stimulate
the labour market and help job seekers, starting on December 1st,
companies hiring young graduates or unemployed people will receive a subsidy of
900 lei, up from 500 lei. Also, unemployed people who have to travel more than
50 km for work and have to relocate will benefit from a relocation allowance of
12,500 lei. Education minister Mircea Dumitru has presented a series of
measures in the field of education, emphasising that a number of strategic
projects are in the pipeline for the end of the year:

A national
programme to help poor families buy school materials for their children has
been extended. This package will be more consistent starting next school year
and may also be available for pre-school children. We would like to launch a
public debate on curricula reforms for compulsory education, for secondary
education. […] For all these social measures to work in education we need
well-prepared and well-motivated teachers, so we need better training for
future teachers. Last but not least, as an outcome of our fight against fraud
and corruption, we are also launching a public debate on the methodology for
the assessment of doctoral schools. In a not too distant future, we also hope
to begin a nationwide process to assess doctoral schools, so that universities
may be able to provide quality education when it comes to training
highly-skilled and high performing workforce.

Fighting poverty is a priority of public policies,
and economic growth should benefit everyone, said the finance minister Anca
Dragu:

We have managed to ensure funding for new programmes
to get children in pre-school education and provide free fruit in schools. A
programme I am very fond of that which seeks to provide free hot meals in
schools, in which I became personally involved. We have allocated 2.5 billion
lei for this programme. It’s not cheap, but it is essential in our fight
against poverty and in ensuring the right education of young people and their
future in Romania. At the beginning of the year we allocated 1.2 billion lei
for the rehabilitation of schools. In the case of vocational training, we plan
to come up with a package of tax measures to support entrepreneurs willing to
fund vocational training. Throughout the year we have provided funds for these
projects in education and healthcare and for fighting poverty. During the
latest budget adjustment in August we managed to find supplementary sources of
funding and allocated 570 million lei to healthcare, over one billion lei to
education and 2.8 billion lei for social assistance.

Speaking about the government’s anti-poverty plan,
the health minister Vlad Vociulescu highlighted the relationship between
poverty and healthcare, underlining that poverty is to blame for bad nutrition,
which eventually leads to illness. People eat cheap foodstuffs containing a lot
of additives because they don’t have money, and this leads to serious health
conditions, including cancer. One of the achievements of the healthcare
ministry is the launch of a medical caravan with Norwegian funding, with
doctors and nurses travelling to isolated villages across the country to
provide free medical services. They ministry is also working on a vaccination
bill to grant social incentives to families who don’t have their children
vaccinated because they don’t have the money.

To implement the anti-poverty package, Romania has at
its disposal more than 572 million euros out of the European Regional
Development Fund for the 2014-2020 period available to projects focusing on
social inclusion and the reduction of poverty.