Fundación Secretariado Gitano

Fundación Secretariado Gitano receives a visit from the Spanish Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy [editar]

• Acción Institucional
• National level

The aim of Bustinduy's visit was to learn first-hand about the context of the Roma community in relation to issues such as education, employment and housing, among others, all of which are linked to the objectives included in the Spanish National Strategy for Roma Equality, Inclusion and Participation 2021-2030. In addition, he also learnt about the response and the impact on people of the programmes carried out by FSG, mainly with the funding it receives from the Ministry of Social Rights and which it will implement within the framework of the European Social Fund Plus until 2029.

This visit was an opportunity to inform the minister of the situation that affects thousands of Roma people and which guide FSG’s main lines of intervention.

Among the issues addressed was the educational situation of Roma students, where, according to the latest study on the educational situation carried out by FSG in 2023, the fundamental right to education of Roma youth is not sufficiently guaranteed. And with regard to employment, the situation, according to the study carried out in 2019, points to strong inequality and lack of protection in access to economic and social rights in relation to the general population. Poverty and exclusion affect more than 80% of the Roma population and 46% are extremely poor; the child poverty rate stands at 89%; the unemployment rate among the Roma population is 52%; and only 17% of the Roma population over the age of 16 have completed compulsory secondary education or higher, according to the data from the aforementioned study.

Discrimination continues to be one of the main obstacles faced by the Roma community, and in the case of women it has a greater impact on them due to the intersectionality that affects them. They suffer from a lack of opportunities both because they are women and because they are Roma, together with other conditioning factors such as poverty. The situation of children and the eradication of slums are other issues that FSG raised.

During the visit, the Minister shared spaces with more than twenty participants from the FSG's main programmes, such as Acceder, which focuses on employment inclusion, and Calí, which focuses on Roma women's equality. Their own experiences have served as a framework to learn about the different pathways that people follow and the impact this has on their lives and their immediate environment.

Among the participants that the Minister met were two groups of young people from the TándEM programme that FSG is developing in collaboration with the Public State Employment Service and with funding from the NextGenerationEU Funds. The specialities of these two groups are the installation of solar panels and gardening.

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