Programs: Refugee Return and Reintegration

 

 

Infrastructure: As part of the CRDA program, particular attention was given to vulnerable social groups, including refugees and internally displaced persons. At the local community level, these population groups faced various basic infrastructure problems. Most refugee settlements were built on an ad hoc basis as people arrived in Serbia, resulting in groups of houses without roads, electricity and water supply. In order to solve these problems, ADF worked with refugees and IDPs to help them organize community groups to cooperate with municipal administrations and international organizations to improve their neighborhoods. CRDA successfully implemented projects of improving electrical supply and constructing access roads to refugee settlements.

 

All of the projects avoided ghetto-ization of refugee population and the CRDA-E program worked on improving relations between the refugee and local populations by providing assistance to both groups.         In a number of cases, both refugee and domiciled populations received benefits from CRDA-E projects, particularly related to projects that built transformer stations and roads or reconstructed health clinics. The CRDA-E program provided significant support for implementation of advocacy campaigns such as promoting the legalization of houses that were very often built without permits.

 

Economic Development: ADF strongly supported refugees and internally displaced persons that were resettled heavily in Vojvodina, largely because of its large areas of unused farm lands. These groups have mostly been promoting vegetable production near Novi Sad and fruit production near Novi Slankerman. ADF assisted in incorporating the farmers into local cooperatives, which increased their integration into the local economy and allowed for a shared forum of knowledge, training and market information.

 

To assist these vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities, ADF’s small and medium enterprise (SME) assistance approach built upon regional development experience in creating loan facilitation, access to credit and women’s handicraft cooperatives. ADF fostered the growth of small scale enterprises formed natural production and marketing chains. In our program in Vojvodina, ADF was able to help local assistance groups to selectively choose successful cluster groups according to the Porter school of thought on cluster economics. ADF devised clusters of dynamic semi-cohesive groups from a region suffering from the economic cost of supporting the absorption of 20% to 30% of Serbia’s total population of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDP). ADF formed cooperatives of small farmers, some of which were entirely refugee or IDP Serbs and others were mainly Hungarians, Croatians, Romanians, Ruthenians, and Roma. Despite the ethnic differences, the tools of using microfinance, loan facilitation, and donations of capital goods have proved to be powerful incentives to form cooperatives. The farmers themselves contributed an average 100 Euro each to initiate the organization.