Facilitating access to and take up of Youth Guarantee measures by young Roma in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania

The ‘Mind The Gap!’ project was aimed at analysing and consequently, facilitating access to Youth Guarantee (YG) measures provided by the national Public Employment Services (PES) for Roma youth in Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.

The BI was part of a collaborative framework of think tanks and Roma organisations from these three countries to assess and promote take up of Youth Guarantee measures by Roma youth in Hungary.

At local level the project strived to raise awareness on YG among Roma youth and local civic organisations, to help matchmaking local stakeholders in the field of youth employment, and to build advocacy capacities at the local level by facilitating exchange between the local PES offices and NGOs, Roma activists.

Based on PES administrative data received from the Ministry of Finance and covering the programme period January 2015 – August 2017, we assessed the performance of the local PES offices and concluded our quantitative analysis with the following key observations:

• Performances of the local PES offices vary greatly – in terms of covering the local youth target group and YG take up rates.
• In fact, the share of YG participants is a little bit higher in districts, where the share of Roma among local young NEETs is higher than the national median share. So, there is a fair chance to enter YG also in districts with Roma population above the national median.
• Prioritising young NEETs registered as unemployed for more than six months (long- term unemployed) among entrants has slowly faded away in the first programme period.
• The higher probability of younger jobseekers and those with no work experience before goes against the little adverse selection found in case of better education
• While gender does not have a significant effect during selection, YG participation does not seem to have an effect on the probability of employment, either - at least, during the first period (2015-2017).

Besides the quantitative results, we conducted interviews with (both governmental and non-governmental) local stakeholders, organised focus groups, matchmaking workshops, and used participatory research methods to work for better access to and increased take up of the YG schemes at the local level.

The project delivered three national reports with policy recommendations, an YG information package, including a local advocacy toolkit. These outputs are published on the partners’ websites (for the Bulgarian report check here, and for the Romanian one here).

The project was coordinated by the Bulgarian Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), and financed by the Open Society Foundations. Our national partner was Romaversitas, and we collaborated with the Romanian Center for European Policies (CRPE) and the Roma Entrepreneurship Development Initiative (REDI) from Romania, and with the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) and the World Without Borders (WWB) from Bulgaria.