Project: Roma in Serbia: How safe they feel and do they see improvements?

22May2015

Internally Displaced Roma Living in Abject Poverty

About 21,000 internally displaced Roma in Serbia live below poverty line and about 20,000 of them live in inadequate housing, according to a study presented by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Thursday.

Less than one-half of internally displaced Roma own their own housing, while one-third of them live on premises not fit for human tenancy, study author Slobodan Cvejic said.

"The study showed that three-fourths of respondents live in less than 15 square meters of housing per member of household, that one-half of them do not have some of the elementary amenities (running water, electricity, sewage, telephone), and that nearly 90 percent of them live in substandard housing with damp and crumbling carpentry and walls," Cvejic said.