News server Personalista.com reports that a large-scale survey of more than 200 communities throughout the Czech Republic is about to take place in order to determine the degree of their social exclusion and what the people living in such environments must deal with. The venture is part of the Analysis of Socially Excluded Localities in the Czech Republic that is being performed by the GAC company for the Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry (MPSV) since the start of the year.
The results will help target EU aid from the European Social Fund to the places where it is most needed. Socially excluded localities in the Czech Republic must not be perceived solely as Romani ghettos, as shown by a previous analysis from the year 2006.
The issue of poverty and social exclusion does not just concern minorities, but also involves a certain segment of the majority population. The MPSV will therefore be working, for example, on a new law on social housing and on amending the law on aid to those in material distress, both of which are closely related to the issue of socially excluded localities.
"A significant amount of money is being spent to prevent and solve the problems resulting from social exclusion. In order to distribute that money directly and effectively, we must know what the actual situation is and what will help the most in which places," explained Czech Labor and Social Affairs Minister Michaela Marksová-Tominová during a visit to a socially excluded locality in Jáchymov last Thursday.
The minister has already personally visited dozens of the areas so afflicted in various regions of the Czech Republic during her work trips. Thanks to other projects financed by the European Social Fund, there are already enough analyses and documents available about this particular issue.
The task of the current analysis is, among other things, to evaluate those documents. As of now researchers have managed to collect 259 different materials covering the time period of 2006-2013.
Those materials will soon be available to the public on the website of the European Social Fund in the Czech Republic. After examining the documents collected, field investigations were then scheduled.
Those investigations will take place from July through September of this year. The plan is to intensively investigate a representative sample of 205 communities so the research will capture their full scale in terms of geographic location, the number of their inhabitants at risk of social exclusion, and their size.
