A Voice For the Voiceless

MISSION

The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Profile: Gyula in Hungary

Well Connected: Hungary: eRider Gyula Vamosi

Gyula Vamosi
Email him.
ICQ: 306625990
MSN: eriderhungary@hotmail.com

When a prominent Roma leader was elected to the Hungarian Parliament early in 2002, as a member of the majority party, Gyula Vamosi, himself a Roma, spotted an opportunity to use information technology on behalf of one of Europe's largest and most needy Roma populations. The result was a meeting of two innovative minds and a breakthrough in the use of IT for social and political activism.


By Corinne Packer, updated by Aspen Brinton

László Teleki was not only the first Roma MP to be elected to Parliament in Hungary, but the country's first Minister for Roma Affairs. Gyula Vamosi, who lives in the city of Pecs, is Hungary's first eRider.

Together with Enisa Eminova in Macedonia, Gyula was selected for training as an eRider in early 2002 under a pilot project by the Open Society Institute (OSI) and The Advocacy Project (AP). AP was asked by OSI in 2002 to identify and train eRiders in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe who could serve the needs of OSI's Roma grantees. Gyula was already known to the Roma NGO community in Hungary as a committed activist who enjoyed working with computers. Like Enisa, he had also launched an innovative project to defend Roma rights at the community level.

The Needs of Hungary's Roma

Gyula knew from growing up in an urban Roma community that the Roma of Hungary did little to influence government policy to the benefit of their own communities. Roma civil society needed to be stimulated and empowered.

His opportunity came in June 2002, when the Hungarian-born Roma MP, László Teleki, was appointed to the post of the nation's first State Secretary for Roma Affairs. Teleki came into office with an ambitious agenda. Hungary has the third largest Roma population in Europe - some 600,000 out of a total population of just under 10 million.

One of Teleki's goals is to improve the education of Roma children. About 70 percent of all Hungarians complete high school, but the percentage of Roma who graduate is less than 10 percent. Furthermore, once Roma leave school, they remain at a severe disadvantage when it comes to employment opportunities, housing and poverty. Teleki therefore wants to see Roma children given the same opportunities as Hungarians, starting with kindergarten, which he feels should employ Roma teaching assistants to help bridge the gap between the schools and Roma parents. Teleki would also like to see a full revision of the system of remedial schooling and further education opened up to talented Roma children, perhaps through scholarships. But Teleki's ability to act was severely limited by his inability to communicate with his constituents. Gyula sat down with him and found that because the MP was often in session or in meetings at irregular times, he would often miss appointments. It was also costly to visit Roma groups, which were scattered across the country. The money for visits had to come from the MP, or the groups themselves.

Teleki contacted his constituents mainly through mobile phone, which was also expensive as well as unreliable. The batteries were forever running low, and the phone had to be switched off during sessions of parliament. At one point, Teleki was so overwhelmed with calls on his mobile that he had to shut it off for several weeks.

The IT Connection

Gyula quickly put two and two together. He realized that poor communications was hindering Teleki's ability to represent his Roma constituents and making it harder for the Hungarian government to meet the needs of Hungary's large and needy Roma population. Gyula realized that information technology could address both problems.

Virtually every Roma community in Hungary has a Roma Community Center (RCC) which serves as a meeting place for Roma and a focal point for Roma civil society. Both Gyula and MP Teleki had served as RCC presidents, and they knew that the RCCs have the potential to stimulate discussion in communities, increase the political participation of Roma, and act as channels of information and communication. But they also knew that this potential was far from being realized.

Gyula decided to design a pilot project that would connect the RCCs with their MP by means of information technology. He pointed out to Teleki that having access to the Internet would allow him to check in with his constituents whenever he had a spare moment, stay informed of events as soon as they happened, and even hold meetings with Roma groups throughout Hungary on-line.

Not surprisingly, Teleki was very receptive to the idea. He also needed very little training in the use of e-mail, e-groups and the web. The only problem is that he had no computer at home and found it difficult to find one at his office.

Getting the Roma Centers Online - Training

Gyula found that helping the RCCs to use computers and get on-line required much more work than initially anticipated. He only had six weeks to complete his pilot project, so he chose to focus on five Roma Community Centers. All five are funded by the Open Society Institute's Roma Participation Program and were therefore relatively well-established. In addition, they were well known to Gyula, and situated within 500 kilometers of his home. This made them good trial cases for a pilot project.
Gyula started by making an assessment of the technology equipment and the IT skills of the staff (mostly volunteers) in each Center. He decided to limit technical training during the pilot phase to two persons in each Center, namely the President and an "information organizer."

Talking Mission:
Gyula and Laszlo Teleki - Roma political state secretary
of Hungary and former leader of a Roma Community Center.

The information organizer was a new post that was appointed by Gyula and the RCC president on Gyula's initial visit. It was one of his most important decisions, as none of the centers had someone assigned specifically to information. Gyula realized that this would be indispensable to the success of the project and, even more importantly, to the efficient administration of the center. Once the organizer was trained in the use of computers and e-mail, he or she would be able to keep the RCC President (who was often very busy or out of the office) abreast of developments at all times. The organizer would also serve as the focal point of information for all those working at RCC or using its facilities.

The information organizer was assigned the responsibility of logging on every day, opening e-mails, and responding to communications when the President was unable to do this. These are the sorts of things that typically help an office to run efficiently. But they were not happening in the Roma Community Centers because of the lack of technical know-how and the fact there was no permanent staff official specifically allocated to information tasks.

As part of his organizational restructuring, Gyula suggested placing the information organizer on the payroll of the RCCs. In order to ensure continuity and commitment, it would also be necessary for the organizer's salary to be included as a line item in each RCC budget. Gyula is aware that budget lines for computers and administration are often the first to be cut when Centers are asked by donors to reduce their budgets. But he also encouraged the Centers participating in his pilot project to defend the IT budget in the face of such demands, and to become thoroughly committed to using information.

Having selected his trainees and explained to them the fundamentals of the project, Gyula set about training them how to use e-mail, search the Internet, establish and use e-group discussions, and find and organize information. They quickly understood how IT could help, not least because it would replace the expensive and unreliable mobile phones. Gyula was surprised by how quickly the trainees began to make regular use of an e-group forum and move from one-to-one phone conversations to group e-mails.

Yet establishing a communication process was not the only challenge, so was finding hardware. Gyula discovered huge disparities in his initial assessment of the technical equipment of the Roma centers. Some were well-equipped (even over-stocked) with computers, although most of the machines were so outdated that they required some 30 minutes to access the Internet. Gyula encouraged the RCCs to share spare computers, which they happily did.

Together with a trained computer technician, he then assessed the RCCs' hardware and software, and drafted a proposal. In his estimation, the entire communication needs of the five Centers could be covered by US$10,000. This would be offset by the money saved from reducing staff-time and cutting down on unnecessary travel. Furthermore, the installations would also immediately boost the productivity of the RCCs.

Broadening the Horizons

By the end of the pilot project, Gyula had expanded its scope beyond the original goal of helping the five RCCs communicate with MP Teleki. By now, it was about helping the RCCs use IT to work more efficiently and form a network with other RCCs. What had started as a modest initiative on behalf of one MP had evolved into information capacity-building in its broadest sense.

As a further extension of this capacity building, Gyula proposed to the RCCs that if they could make contact before national meetings, they would cut the time spent during the actual meetings. As a result, when the National Roma Association drafted new rules to be discussed at the next national meeting of RCCs, the draft rules were first posted on the net by an RCC. Other RCCs reacted and offered revisions. When the time came to actually meet, the rules had already been widely discussed and revised, and were quickly adopted.

On another occasion the RCCs were expecting a visit from a representative of the EU to discuss the situation of human rights in Roma communities. The Centers were able to put their new training to use and prepare a common position through prior e-group discussions.

At the end of the pilot project, Gyula left the trainees with some homework. He asked them to weigh up the benefits of a common website that could be shared between all of the thirty-odd Roma organizations and RCCs in Hungary which are members of the National Roma Association. They had the task of looking up websites of other non-profit organizations, determining their strengths and weaknesses, and deciding what would appear on their own common website if they chose to have one.

Gyula's eventual goal is that his trainees become so comfortable with IT that they will use it in their networking. But even if this does not happen, his project is already a clear success. MP Teleki and the RCCs are now in regular contact by e-mail, and the MP has even been able to turn his mobile phone back on. The RCCs are sharing information between each other. Meetings are already running more efficiently. It simply remains to upgrade the equipment of the RCCs which participated in the project and see whether other Roma organizations could also benefit from Gyula's eRiding magic.

From Technology to Campaigns: Roma Civil Society takes on the EU

Since the pilot phase of Gyula's project with the RCCs, his work has expanded to include many more organizations in both Pecs and throughout Hungary. Most recently, he has become involved in helping Roma NGOs launch a campaign for reform of the funding methods of the European Union.

The Roma Education Network (REN), a group of four community organizations in Pecs, Hungary, initiated the campaign with Gyula's assistance. They want the EU to be more inclusive of community-based Roma NGOs, to be more transparent in funding allocation procedures, and to put more pressure on states to improve the lives of Roma people.

The campaign is targeting the EU's "Phare" aid programs, established in 1993 and designed to assist candidate states move toward the criteria of EU membership. One mandate of Phare is improving the conditions of Roma communities, and REN's campaign calls for better oversight of the programs. Roma NGOs like REN want less of the millions of Euros being earmarked for "Roma programs" to go into the EU bureaucracy, and more to reach Roma people still urgently in need of basic resources.

The Roma issue has received a high-profile place in EU accession negotiations, where candidate states must meet the rigors of EU's human rights and social policy criteria. The Roma, because of the violations against them, have become a leverage point between the EU and candidate states. 'Clean up your human rights record on Roma, or stay out of our club,' has been the message leveled at states for the last decade.

But community-based Roma organizations and their Roma constituents have benefited little from the drama of this seemingly high-stakes fanfare. "We've mostly become puppets in someone else's political game," argues Gyula, "In actuality the EU's Phare programs have done little to strengthen Roma NGOs and bring improvements to our communities."

Gyula works as an advisor and eRider to REN, which seeks to improve educational opportunities for Roma children and expand the inclusion of Roma culture and history into the curriculum of the local university. After REN had a bad experience with Phare, Gyula started asking Roma NGOs in other countries about their experiences. He found a wellspring of complaint, frustration, and anger.

As he networked further with other Roma activists throughout EU candidate states, it became obvious that this was an endemic and widespread problem faced by Roma NGOs in most all candidate states. Gyula heard from others what REN had already found: the problem was not the lack of money available, but rather that such a multitude of hands were digging into the deep EU coffers established for 'Roma issues,' and that inclusion of Roma NGOs had become an unimportant and unregulated afterthought of the process.

One obstacle is the mere complexity required to submit a proposal for Phare. To navigate the regulations and bureaucracy requires an expertise many Roma within community-based NGOs simply don't have. Yet many such organizations have nonetheless come into direct contact with Phare, as all proposals must be submitted by consortiums-groups of organizations working together to implement a project. These can include state and local government, schools, universities, and NGOs. It is a well-known Phare guideline that proposals with a greater diversity of groups are more likely to be funded, and this is no different for proposals on Roma issues.

Although well-intentioned, these diversity guidelines do not necessarily result in the inclusion of Roma NGOs into projects meant to benefit Roma communities. "It is common practice," cites Ibolya Bokor, who is working as an advisor to Aranj, a Roma women's NGO in Pecs, "for a lead organizations to get the rubber stamp inclusion of a Roma NGO for a proposal, as a token measure just to score diversity points." The 'lead organizations,' which are responsible for navigating the Phare bureaucracy and submitting the final consortium proposals, are almost always non-Roma organizations and can discriminate at their own will.

Often when Roma NGOs ask to include their own projects within the larger proposals and take on a more meaningful decision-making role within consortiums, the 'lead organization' will ask them to take their requests elsewhere, and will find another Roma NGO willing to provide a 'rubber-stamp' in exchange for only a passive role in the project and a few thousand Euros for compensation. The difference between "passive" and "active" can often mean the difference between programs with a real impact on Roma communities and programs that have only token benefits.

Roma NGOs wanting to be "active" are thus discriminated against long before the proposals ever reach the desks of Phare officials. The EU does little to regulate this planning process, apart from issuing its diversity guidelines, which in practice are enforced by the whim of the lead organizations. Many Roma organizations have thus condemned this planning process for the discriminatory exclusion it perpetuates and the way the requirements for the inclusion of Roma NGOs are simply not clear enough and not well-enforced enough to overcome existing prejudices against Roma.

Finding this pattern of discrimination throughout the EU accession countries was the main impetus to launch a trans-national campaign to reform Phare. With Gyula's encouragement, Roma NGOs in the Czech Republic, Macedonia, and Hungary drafted a petition of complaint about the Phare system. They took the petition to a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna in April, and presented it to ministers and officials gathered to discuss Roma issues.

The OSCE delegates responded initially with surprise. But Gyula and his colleagues used the meeting to network and drum up more support for the petition, including its recommendations for setting up a Roma Working Group to provide oversight of aid programs impacting Roma communities. By the end of the Vienna meeting a coalition of Roma NGOs had convinced OSCE officials to include language from their petition into the final document of the meeting, which set out potential plans for future activities in Roma communities.

Using IT to Unite:
The eRider team is working together on campaigns
for the desegregation of education, Phare funding
reform and the breaking of sexual taboos
in their communities. 

This was a small first step of success, and these Roma activists and NGOs continue to draft plans to expand the reach of the petition. They also want to gather some hard data about how Phare programs have impacted community-based Roma NGOs in all the candidate states, in order to make their case comprehensive and organized. The Advocacy Project is helping them conduct a survey of Roma organizations that have had experiences with Phare. The team of RIP eRiders is translating, distributing, and collecting the surveys via e-mail.

REN's campaign to reform Phare has been expanded to six countries with the help of RIP and the Advocacy Project, and will draw on responses from hundreds of Roma NGOs who want to make the case that Phare prevents needed resources from reaching Roma communities and the Roma NGOs working to support community-based initiatives. Roma civil society will never develop it full potential when faced with this sort of exclusion.

The timing is also crucial. While Phare programs will be formally disbanded in 2004 in those states entering the EU, the same offices will remain open and with a similar function, distributing instead EU Structural Funds. (The equivalent of Phare for member states) Roma NGOs want the change from Phare to Structural Funds to more than just a change in name. They want the new funding regime to learn the lessons of the past, and they think this campaign can show the EU some of its mistakes, and make constructive recommendations for the future.

Overall, Gyula and the NGOs in the campaign want the EU to stop being a puppeteer of Roma people, and to take measures to hold states accountable to EU human rights standards in their treatment of Roma. Without creating opportunities for the voices of grassroots Roma civil society to even get as far as a Phare funding proposal, the EU is silencing one of its greatest assets in the struggle for improving the lives of Roma people - the Roma people themselves.

Gyula has been a key force in moving this campaign forward, as have his RIP colleagues who are networking and surveying Roma NGOs in their own countries. They are hoping that RIP can move beyond technology to allow Roma activists to use information in a way that has an impact on the policy of a major international organization. It is not, in other words, really about the computers - but what motivated and committed people can do with them.