Minister Çitaku attended the Round Table on the Role and impact of additional learning centres for the children of the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities.

Complete speech of the Minister during the meeting:

Honoured,

Integration of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities is a very important process of building a democratic and multi-ethnic state.
Through a legal basis developed in accordance to the international principles, as well through policies for the protection of human rights, the Government of Kosovo shows full commitment for integration of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities in all domains of Kosovo society.
Kosovo institutions have clearly demonstrated their commitment for the integration of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities, by undertaking concrete steps regarding the implementation of the strategy. Despite the constant commitment and engagement of institutions, there are identified some difficulties and challenges during effective implementation of the strategy, which resulted with reality improvement stagnation for these communities.

Considering the importance to this issue into the Kosovo’s European agenda, as well the demands emerged from the feasibility study for Kosovo, Ministry of European Integration is committed to carefully monitor this process in order to achieve a satisfactory outcome from the implementation of the action plan regarding this strategy.

A team, within the Ministry, is engaged to deal only with this issue, aiming to accelerate implementation of the strategy. Currently this team is working on an overall assessment of the implementation of the strategy at the local level. This team will be also engaged in improving coordination at the central level and to develop further cooperation with NGO`s working with the communities in question.

While this roundtable discusses over education sector in particular, I would like to emphasize that, based on the latest progress report, there was a significant increase of enrolment in the primary school (from 1404 in 2011 to 6485 in 2012) and we can also state that this is an indicator of success. Regarding secondary education, there was an increase from 61 to 526 of Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians, but this represents only 14 % of children from communities in question who had to attend the secondary school.
Education is a key priority of the Government of Kosovo, and is recognized as one of the key criteria in improving living conditions and fighting the poverty. For these communities is particularly important to work more in this sector as a base for full development and integration of these communities.

Thank you.