Why Romania still needs our help

Romania continues to suffer badly after a legacy of 40 years of severe communism - after which Civil Society and social services had to be reconstructed from scratch - and and 20 years of Free Market "reforms"

These dubious - western “market led” reforms by the likes of the World Bank left most of the population 8 times poorer than before. A tiny fraction thrived. But that’s all.

The people who suffer the most are the poor, the sick and the elderly and partcularly the people who live in badly underfunded state institutions. Many who we work with are the former "Romanian orphans" whose desperate plight had such a dramtic effect on world opinion 20 years ago. They graduated from state orphanages to stae institutuiions for adults (see how we help them)

Romania is placed near Namibia and Columbia in its economic indicators report.

Now, thanks to the banking crisis, a huge economic, social and political crises has taken hold.

In 2010 the government has had to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund to deal with huge budget deficits.

The economy is doing very badly. VAT (sales tax) was recently increased from 19% to 24%.

All state employees have had their salaries cut by 25%. Funding of medical, social and educational services continue to be very low and, it here is widespread dissatisfaction across all social categories. A new trend is the migration of qualified workforce (doctors, engineers, teachers) to other European countries.

Every 5th Romanian Child is Exploited: some 900,000 of the approximately 5 million children of Romania are forced to work. Approximately 300,000 (of these) are forced to perform extremely hard manual labour (See note 1)

The north east of Romania - where we have many of our community-based projects - has been described as "the absolute poverty pole of Europe" – (See note 2)

95% of Romanian households in some parts of the north east have no running water, 10% cannot afford to connect to the electricity supply and there are no social services - other than those we provide - for an area of 24,000 people.

With 18 deaths per 1,000 babies born alive, Romania has the 3rd highest infant mortality rate in Europe after Albania (37) and Ukraine (21).

Note 1

"Every 5th Romanian Child is Exploited: some 900,000 of the approximately 5 million children of Romania are forced to work. Approximately 300,000 (of these) are forced to perform extremely hard manual labour . Most of them are illiterate as they were withdrawn from school in order to be able to 'do their job'.

About 89% of the exploited children live in rural environments. Poverty was deemed as the main cause of this situation."

Study by UNICEF, Ministry of Labour Romania and the Bureau of
International Labour Affairs

Note 2

Significantly, over two thirds of the paupers live in rural areas, where the poverty risk is 2.3 times higher than in urban areas. Geographically speaking, 25% of Romania's paupers live in the north eastern province of Moldova, where the poverty risk is 43%. Generally speaking 20% of the paupers are farmers, while another 20% are pensioners.

The most affected individuals are usually children or aged 15 - 24 (40%), followed by farmers (20%), retired personnel (20%), employees (10%) and unemployed (9%).