Monitoring & Evaluation Workshop for Roma, May 2004

Report Submitted by Veronica Nyhan, WBI and Janmejay Singh, SDV on June 15, 2004

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your contributions to the recent regional workshop on Monitoring & Social Accountability for Roma Poverty Reduction. As you know, the challenges facing Roma in Europe are daunting, but the workshop helped to provide them with some tools to improve their status--tools that Roma civil society representatives had specifically requested and will feed into the design and implementation of the Decade of Roma Inclusion.

The participants were extremely diverse in their priorities as well as language and experience which made the workshop more challenging. But in both the formal evaluations and informal comments, participants spoke highly of the content, methods and presenters. Participants reported that "this kind of training is very rare." Many asked for more time in the various sessions. Participants also formed a positive impression of the Bank; for many of them, it was their first experience with our institution.

A ripple effect is anticipated as participants committed to disseminate workshop findings to broader constituencies and to serve as assistant trainers/facilitators in subsequent events. A Virtual Learning Environment (interactive website) was designed to support the workshop as well as future regional networking. Go to: http://www1.worldbank.org/gdln/roma.htm and enter as visitor. We are burning a CD-ROM of the website, which includes all the workshop documents in Serbian and Romani as well as English, to send to all participants. Together these tools will provide useful support to the participants in disseminating workshop materials as well as implementing their country action plans while staying connected with each other and us. I think the action plans demonstrate the extent to which participants benefited from your presentations and insight; I am attaching them for your review.

Once again, thank you for your time, effort, and commitment to making the workshop a success. We hope that the interaction with the participants was also useful for you.

Materials:

Workshop Training Brief (Word)

Video Clip of the Strategy Session via Video Conference (Real Media, 1:36)

Action Plan for Serbia and Montenegro (PowerPoint)

Action Plan for Bulgaria (PowerPoint)

Action Plan for Macedonia (PowerPoint)

Action Plan for Romania (Word)

List of Participants (Word)

Back-to-Office Report (Word)