What do we know about the impact of interventions designed to improve the well-being of the Roma population? This paper, developed for the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, evaluates what works, what doesn’t work and why in interventions for Roma inclusion in Europe in recent years.
The objective of this meta-analysis is to establish an adequate vision of the set of evaluations on Roma inclusion measures taken since 2005 in order to draw lessons on what works best in these types of actions.
64 evaluation reports were analysed, including information from 30 countries related to more than 140 interventions (most of them have been developed at local and national level) The paper highlights:
- Measures and projects with a measurable positive result.
- Key elements of the projects and measures that are working, and reasons for failure.
- Contextual and other factors that could promote or hinder the success of the integration measures of the Roma integration in the Member States.
- Recommendations for the design of future integration interventions (including improved evaluation of interventions or data needs).
The conclusions not only point to certain design elements of public programmes, such as the duration, scale, commitment of the different parties involved and the clear link with universal policies. It also emphasises that the practice of subjecting interventions to robust evaluations, which can rigorously establish whether the intervention works or not, is very scarce in the framework of public policies for the inclusion and equality of the Roma population.