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News server Romea.cz. Everything about Roma in one place

Czech NGO: If you don't open the schools to Roma, how can they get jobs?

21 February 2014
2 minute read

IQ Roma servis, an NGO based in Brno, Czech Republic, sees its main task as convincing Romani people that it is important to attend better schools and convincing Czech parents that the presence of Romani pupils is no reason to enroll their own children elsewhere. The 45 staff and 50 volunteers with the organization help Romani people find jobs, get educations, and reduce their indebtedness. 

Director Katarína Klamková says her staff often have the feeling they are in this effort alone. Nevertheless, IQ Roma servis is doing its best to measure its success, just as private-sector entities do.

"Corporations have so-called key performance indicators, which are naturally easy for them to establish, a bank taught us how to do this – they measure, for example, the number of mortgages they have sold. With us it’s more complicated. However, we have also established such indicators for ourselves and we have seven strategic aims," Klamková said in an interview for Radio Wave.

"For example, when it comes to increasing the educational successess of the younger generation of Roma, we are measuring the number of children coming to us for tutoring and the percentage of those children whose grades have improved, so we are looking at the success of our tutoring service through the hard indcator of report cards. Sustainability is also important, we also have high school students, and we look at how many children applied to a high school and whether they got into one. They received mentoring and tutoring from us, and we follow whether they are improving, whether they are passing, whether there aren’t some moments of risk – we measure all of this. During 2013 we had 25 high school students, of whom 19 completed ninth grade, four completed technical high school, two graduated from acaedemic high school, and 95 % continued their cooperation with us. We have more such aims, such as increasing the degree to the Romani people assert themselves on the labor market, increasing their pride in their work, reducing their levels of indebtedness, increasing the number of people living in dignified housing, and improving the Romani image," the director said. 

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