Le 5 décembre 2009, la belle inconnue Malika Ménard devient Miss France. A 22 ans, elle est la première gagnante du concours uniquement élue par les votes du public. Un pari lancé par le Comité France et décroché haut la main par la Normande.
Entente parfaite entre Geneviève de Fontenay et Malika. Si la dame au chapeau a quitté le Comité France avec perte et fracas, elle reste la meilleure supportrice de la candidature de Miss France dans les concours internationaux.
Coup de foudre entre le créateur à la marinière et la belle brunette. Après une séance organisée par Gala au cours de laquelle le couturier a rhabillé Malika, les deux fans de mode ne se quittent plus. La Miss est venue au défilé dans une charmante petite robe du styliste.
Malika Ménard n’est pas seulement douée pour porter les plus belles robes. Brillante étudiante de droit, elle multiplie également les activités. Dans son emploi du temps chargé, la Miss a quand même réussi à trouver un créneau pour l’un de ses amis, le footballeur lillois Rio Mavuba.
Aux NRJ Music Awards, Malika semble tout juste sortie de l’eau. Rien de plus naturel pour la plus belle des sirènes normandes.
Elue par un nombre record de téléspectateurs français, Malika Ménard remplit touts les critères de la Miss idéale. En plus d’être belle et ambitieuse, elle semble prendre du plaisir à promouvoir des valeurs françaises. Peu crédible…
Passionnée par les voyages, la Miss France 2010 aura sûrement la chance de visiter une bonne partie du globe grâce à son statut. Si elle a soufflé ses 23 bougies lors d’une étape du tour de France, lundi soir c’est à Las Vegas qu’elle réalisera l’un de ses plus grands rêves.
Depuis quelques années, les Sud-américaines décrochent la couronne de Miss Univers, mais la Française Malika Ménard pourrait venir bouleverser le casting. Un rêve que la jeune Normande de 23 ans réalisera peut-être ce soir. De Caen, sa ville de coeur, à Las Vegas, la cité américaine organisatrice du spectacle, il n’y a qu’un pas pour notre miss France 2010.
Gala.fr vous propose, en attendant le sacre, de revenir en images sur le début de règne de la plus jolie des Françaises.
Lionsgate et le réalisateur Francis Lawrence ont confirmé la présence de Philip Seymour Hoffman au casting de “Hunger Games: L’Embrasement”. Le comédien incarnera Plutarch Heavensbee.
Lionsgate et le réalisateur Francis Lawrence ont confirmé la présence de Philip Seymour Hoffman au casting de Hunger Games – L’embrasement. Le comédien incarnera Plutarch Heavensbee, le Haut-Juge qui succède à Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) et préside l’édition anniversaire des 75ème Hunger Games.
Philip Seymour Hoffman rejoint donc Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson et Woody Harrelson au casting du second volet de la saga Hunger Games, adaptée des romans de Suzanne Collins. Après les premiers Hunger Games, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) est devenue le symbole de la rébellion. Le peuple de Panem est impatient de la retrouver pour la grande Tournée de la victoire. Mais Katniss va devoir prouver au Capitole et au Président Snow (Donald Sutherland) que ses sentiments envers Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) étaient sincères afin de sauver ceux qu’elle aime. Le tournage du long métrage débutera à la fin du mois de juillet et le film sortira le 22 novembre 2013 aux Etats-Unis.
Mélodie en sous-sol mineur pour Joey Starr qui va jouer un flic de la BPM au cinéma.
Joey Starr mérite bien plus que la rubrique faits-divers. Artiste tous azimuts, l’excellent rappeur a démontré qu’il avait aussi la carrure pour porter un rôle dans Le Bal Des Actrices. Et il suffisait d’un producteur plutôt gonflé pour qu’il franchisse un nouveau pas… C’est chose faite: le bad boy devient flic à l’écran!
Selon Le Parisien, Joey Starr est en train de tourner Polisse, un long-métrage « qui raconte le quotidien d’un groupe de policiers de la BPM (brigade de Protection des Mineurs de Paris). »
Un film calibré selon les codes du documentaire où il y aura aussi… de l’amour. Oui, nous ne rêvons pas, le personnage incarné par Joey Starr- à savoir un flic évidemment un peu hors normes- va craquer pour une belle photographe! Maïwenn sera justement du casting, de même que
,
,
pou encore Sandrine Kiberlain.
Une diversification de l’activité fort heureuse pour la Joey Starr Cie qui a le vent particulièrement en poupe ces temps derniers… L’artiste vient en effet de livrer son image aux A.P.C. et Carhartt. Mais il faut dire que le bonhomme porte bien les casquettes, toutes les casquettes.
De nombreuses personnalités du show-business américain participent à l’action de Keep A Child Alive. L’association qui vient en aide aux enfants atteint par le SIDA, a demandé l’aide des stars pour sa nouvelle campagne.
will die. Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga,
,
, Katie Holmes et bien d’autres encore, vont mourir mais vous pouvez racheter leurs vies. C’est la message choc qu’a choisi de faire passer Keep A Child Alive sur son site Internet. L’association parrainée par Alicia Keys, est coutumière des campagnes de publicités dérangeantes et elle vient encore de le prouver. Elle propose à tous les donateurs potentiels de racheter les vies «numériques» des stars.
Dès le 1er décembre, Usher et ses copains chanteurs ou Serena Williams et ses amies actrices, fermeront leurs comptes Twitter et leurs profils Facebook. The Digital Life Sacrifie (Le sacrifice de la vie digitale) va occasionner le décès de dizaines d’existences virtuelles. Nos célébrités ressusciteront sur la Toile, lorsqu’un million de dollars seront récoltés.
L’interprète de Fallin et épouse du producteur Switt Beaz, est très impliquée dans les démarches de l’association. Elle s’est confiée au New York Times à propos de ce nouveau projet «C’est tellement important de choquer le public au point de le réveiller. C’est une manière très directe et un peu sarcastique d’aborder les choses, mais ça devrait amener les gens à prêter attention à la cause des enfants atteints du SIDA.”
En choisissant de participer à cette campagne, les stars risquent de faire des malheureux, en tout cas du côté des fans. Quand on sait que Lady Gaga, compte 7 215 000 «followers» (internautes qui suivent ses aventures) sur Twitter, on comprend l’impact espéré par l’association.
A la ville, les people sont toujours bien vivants et leurs activités devraient, normalement, être encore relayées pendant cette période, par le reste des médias.
fait rire une bonne partie de la France, mais pas toute. Après les accusations de manipulation lancées (un peu vite) par , c’est au tour de de dénoncer la méthode Petit Journal.
Le président du MoDem n’est pas la seule tête de pipe du jeu de massacre de Yann Barthès. Après avoir été accusé de détourner des images de réunions politiques par François Bayrou, l’animateur du Petit Journal, sur Canal+ est maintenant la cible de Lara Fabian qui lui reproche de la ridiculiser.
Lara Fabian assure dans une interview donnée sur Europe 1: « Il me fait passer pour une idiote complète. Si ça l’amuse, pourquoi pas… » Mais ce n’est pas le seul grief de la chanteuse à l’égard de Canal +. Une chaîne où elle trouve un plus redoutable miroir déformant de sa personnalité à travers sa marionnette des Guignols. « Barthès, il fait son métier, c’est tout. C’est son job. Les Guignols, c’était beaucoup plus grave, beaucoup plus profond comme attaque ».
« En fait j’essaie de ne plus trouver une raison à ça. Je connais les raisons. Je suis persuadée que c’est mon enthousiasme, que c’est ma joie d’enfant, que c’est cette façon de faire les choses avec à la fois énormément de légèreté et de sérieux qui énerve. Et c’est à la fois pour ça que je suis détestée et aimée. Je ne crée pas de sentiments neutres. »
Pour ce qui est de François Bayrou, pas de commentaires, même si le Petit Journal a diffusé ce mardi des images tendant à prouver que l’émission n’avait pas fabriqué les propos du président du Mouvement démocrate. Mais on s’attend à de nouvelles protestations de ce dernier. En attendant, François Bayrou ne devait sortir du Val-de-Grâce que ce jeudi, car subissant un «approfondissement des examens», selon la vice-présidente du MoDem Marielle de Sarnez. Laquelle assure que François Bayrou a ressenti un « trouble » au cours de l’émission, se rendant de lui-même à l’hôpital pour y subir des examens. Diagnostic de l’IRM et de l’électrocardiogramme: pas d’accident cérébral ou cardiaque. Mais ce mal-être pourrait servir d’excuse aux contradictions de François Bayrou confronté aux images du Petit Journal où il assurait notamment: « Nous sommes un peuple qui fait des enfants » et « les partis se tiennent par leurs noyaux durs. »
The EU and the destruction of the world’s tropical forests
European consumption is the leading cause of deforestation.
As the merry-go-round of government meetings and memos gains momentum ahead of the United Nations’ next climate summit, in Poland this November, some of the answers that policymakers are looking for are staring them in the face.
If governments stop subsidising and incentivising the destruction of the world’s tropical forests, as much as a fifth of global carbon emissions could be avoided.
Unfortunately, the current approach is wiping out an area of forest larger than Ireland every year, meaning that in some countries tropical forests could all but disappear within 50 years. And according to a European Commission study published on 2 July, the main problem is not China or the US, but Europe itself. Europe accounts for 36% of the trade in products and commodities that drive deforestation, although it houses just 7% of the world’s population.
This matters, not just because tropical forests are the planet’s lungs and a vital store of carbon. They are critical to the livelihoods of over a billion people and they are a medicine cabinet for all of us. No less than 50% of cancer drugs come from rainforest plants, for example.
We need an alternative system that moves away from viewing them as timber mines to be liquidated for profit.
So far, attempts to address this have badly misread the scale and nature of the problem. Schemes under which rich donor countries pay poor ones to keep forests standing are not working, because these governments can make more money from investors who know that consumption is rising. Tree-planting will never replace the biodiversity, cultural heritage or climate regulation offered by ancient forests. We need solutions that tackle both supply and demand.
Europe currently does the most damage, so it should lead. It already has objectives: in 2008, environment ministers from the European Union set a goal of reducing tropical deforestation by at least 50% by 2020, and halting deforestation completely by 2030. But the EU is short of these targets.
The French government is showing the way forward. Its development minister, Pascal Canfin, recently announced that France’s development policies will follow a zero deforestation and forest-degradation path. France will establish a new action plan for tropical forests, directing money away from logging companies to support land tenure rights for forest communities.
Norway obliges companies to disclose their environmental impacts. Food companies now publish their use of palm oil, a major driver of deforestation; as a result, Norway’s food sector reduced palm-oil consumption by two-thirds in a single year. The EU could follow suit by extending transparency and reporting rules.
As the world’s biggest aid donor and a major trade partner, the EU is also best positioned to initiate a new international approach to valuing tropical forests. It is currently in the process of agreeing ‘voluntary partnership agreements’ with several developing countries to fight illegal logging.
This is welcome, but the bigger problem is the legal, donor-subsidised industrial timber sector, which now frequently claims to practise ‘sustainable forest management’. But from Cambodia to Cameroon, Global Witness has shown how industrial logging typically marks the beginning of the end for tropical forests.
The EU should promote a wholesale re-think on land-use planning and development strategies in tropical forested countries. Global demand should only be served from those areas that are already heavily degraded, from existing plantations and non-forested lands, and through the more careful use of products already made.
The EU’s deforestation targets will never be met if policymakers continue implicitly to accept the death of forests as a necessary evil to meet consumer demand. Fortunately, Europe has the power and means to lead. It should demonstrate that in Poland.
Alexandra Pardal works for Global Witness, a London-based financial, environmental and human-rights watchdog.
Carbon capture and storage, once championed as providing a cleaner, brighter future for fossil fuels, has yet to live up to the promises made for it
At the end of 2012, the European Commission had at its disposal €1.2 billion for funding clean-energy projects. The money had come from the auctioning of emission allowances under the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) – the NER300 programme. But when the deadline came for decisions on which projects would receive money, there was no carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme among them, because no member state was ready to put up the necessary matching funding for a CCS project that would secure the EU money.
The disappointment in the Commission was enormous. CCS has been feted as a promising means to render conventionally ‘dirty’ hydrocarbon sources of energy environmentally acceptable. But the technology has to be tested and demonstration projects were deemed necessary. The NER300 funding was supposed to deliver them.
The idea behind CCS is that the carbon dioxide emitted when fossil fuels are burnt would be captured, dissolved into liquid and that liquid would be stored underground in what are effectively reservoirs. In some scenarios, the liquid would be pumped into bedrock to replace (even force out) the reserves of oil being extracted.
While there are some CCS projects already working round the world, the demonstration projects would provide much-needed information about the process such as the amount of energy used, the suitability of certain types of rock, and the emissions savings.
Financial constraints
Given the difficult economic climate and the straitened public finances in most member states, it is perhaps not surprising that governments are reluctant or unable to put forward public money for the construction of very expensive CCS projects.
Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, is still hoping that further projects may be put forward later in the year. “The good news is that there will be a second chance [for CCS] in the second call of the NER300 programme in December,” she said.
But there are indications that the Commission believes that the NER300 will need reinforcing.
An internal document leaked from the Commission in January observed that the current low price of carbon is not incentivising development of CCS projects. The carbon price would need to be between €40-€70 per tonne of carbon dioxide to stimulate investment, it concludes. The price is currently less than €5 per tonne.
The document shows that in order to boost development of CCS the Commission is considering mandatory emissions performance standards for the power sector, or a CCS certificate scheme. If a certificate scheme were to be adopted, power plants and fuel suppliers would be required to purchase CCS certificates corresponding to the amount of their emissions and the proceeds used to fund the projects’ development. The leaked paper suggests that the Commission is considering requiring member states that are heavily reliant on coal, such as Poland, to develop national CCS strategies.
All of the scenarios in the Commission’s energy roadmap for 2050 assume that CCS will be implemented in some form or another. One scenario does look at the possibility that the deployment of CCS will be delayed, and suggests greater use of nuclear energy as a solution to bridge the gap. That looks politically improbable at present. Either the roadmap must be re-drawn or the Commission has to get the development of CCS back on track. The fate of CCS will have a big effect on the future use of fossil fuels in Europe.
Austerity policies are allegedly undermining the European Union. In reality fragmentation is a bigger threat than austerity.
In a lucid study of the financial crisis in the United States, Alan Blinder, a professor at Princeton University, points out that the American housing market began to develop craters in 2005, well before the sub-prime housing loan debacle struck and Lehman Brothers crashed in September 2008.
Blinder identifies a slow-burning disaster that developed over several years. Today, another incremental but pernicious slow-burning calamity is under way.
Financial market fragmentation, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), is again undermining growth, especially in the EU’s troubled peripheral countries, notably Spain and Italy, putting both the eurozone and the European Union at risk.
A year ago, financial fragmentation as well as a retreat by cross-border investors and banks to their home markets, particularly from the weaker, peripheral sovereign states, was part of what triggered a succession of dramatic political and economic initiatives, including European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s pledge in July to do “whatever it takes” to save the single currency.
In spite of those steps, financial fragmentation is back with a vengeance, but now in a sector that, as was the case with the sub-prime mortgage sector in the US, does not generally feature in newspaper headlines or the speeches of senior politicians.
Significantly, however, Angela Merkel Germany’s chancellor, in a speech last week, (25 April) in Dresden, explicitly raised the issue, saying that “unfavourable financing conditions” for SMEs were undermining economic reforms in the troubled eurozone periphery.
It is not that, as with US sub-prime loans, there are hundreds of billions of exotic securities tied to European SME loans. But according to the European Central Bank, Europe’s SMEs account for three-quarters of eurozone employment and 60% of corporate added value. Those SMEs matter – a lot. So the fact that they are struggling to raise funds and that, as Merkel pointed out, those in Italy and Spain are being forced to pay much more for their bank borrowing than similar companies in Germany and Austria, threatens EU cohesion.
Last week in Brussels, on the same day that Merkel spoke, a conference on financial stability and integration organised by the European Commission and the ECB, heard top officials including Vitor Constancio, vice-president of the ECB, put as optimistic a gloss as they could on the progress made so far in tackling financial fragmentation.
Behind the scenes, however, anxiety reigns, which is no wonder, judging from the Global Financial Stability Review released the previous week by the International Monetary Fund.
“While the previous declines in foreign investors’ claims on periphery sovereigns have begun to reverse, the cross-border banking market in the euro area remains deeply fragmented,” the GFSR says. It then highlights the difficulties for firms in the periphery and adds, ominously, “SMEs are bearing the brunt of the reduction in bank credit.”
Hitherto, the SME financing crisis has been overshadowed by the ‘big picture’, ie, a debate amongst politicians, policymakers and the media, focusing on the merits or demerits of applying austerity measures (allegedly excessively tight macro-economic policies), as opposed to combining fiscal and monetary policy stimulus.
But this macro-economic policy debate is inadequate, indeed sterile, without taking account of the micro-economic policy detail – welfare and labour market reform for example, and, above all, micro-financial policy.
Because the mathematically driven macro-economic models so beloved of governments and commentators during the era of inflation-targeting and light-touch regulation have nothing useful to say about financial markets, even though it is financial markets that are shaping economic events, as they have been for a decade or more. As for erroneous financial theories, they were part of the problem.
Last summer, it was widely assumed that if Europe’s sovereign debt crisis could be tamed and interest rates for the Italian and Spanish governments and banks and big corporations with access to bond markets brought down to tolerable levels, economic growth would resume.
After all, the ECB (like the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England) has been flooding the markets and the banks with money to lend.
Most hoped that the cost of SME loans would fall significantly too. This has not happened. Few foresaw that, rather than take the risk of increasing their lending to businesses, the banks would either continue to sit on their liquidity and park it back at the central bank or, under pressure from governments, lend much of it back to the troubled peripheral sovereigns.
According to investment bank Goldman Sachs, “the bottom line of the ECB’s most recent lending survey (24 April) is that banks have tightened credit conditions further for both businesses and households in the last three months …notably in Italy and Spain…[but not in Germany and France]”.
Nicolaos Panigirtzoglou of JP Morgan says that, in spite of not having had a housing bubble like Spain’s, in Italy the volume of non-performing bank loans (NPLs) is now also rising rapidly, narrowing the gap with Spanish banks’ NPLs, which are still rising.
As noted here previously (“Funding crisis for Europe’s SMEs threatens recovery”, 18-24 April), perhaps the most worrying characteristic of the still-evolving banking/financial crisis in Europe, including the United Kingdom (where the Bank of England last week launched another desperate attempt to kick-start lending to SMEs) is the region’s over-dependence for finance on banks. This distinguishes Europe sharply from the United States.
The way in which the heavily indebted SME sector in the periphery is now being strangled by its inadequate access to bank loans is creating another ‘doom loop’: rising losses at banks are contributing to increasing reluctance to lend and so to yet more losses as economies and firms contract.
It is hard to see how the expected cut in ECB interest rates widely expected either today (2 May) or next month will do much to help the SME sector. Some ECB officials have rightly made this point. Privately, however, officials say that new initiatives, some involving the European Investment Bank and perhaps even the ECB itself, are now being discussed.
The funding crisis for SMEs is much more than economic. What began last year as the “Balkanisation” of Europe’s financial markets has helped to entrench political divisions in a region which, unlike the US, is made up of unitary nation states.
As economic conditions in the periphery deteriorate, unemployment in Spain hit 27 % last month – a democratically intolerable six million unemployed – the tensions intensify between north and south, the stable and unstable, the periphery and the core.
Fragmentation in all its dimensions – financial, economic and political – is undermining not just the promise of the single currency, but also of the single market, and so, of the EU itself.
Stewart Fleming is a freelance journalist based in London.
Member states make last-minute concessions to secure MEPs’ backing.
The European Parliament has extracted concessions from the member states on the European Union’s budget for 2014-20.
Concessions made in last-ditch talks in Brussels this morning between the EU’s main institutions open the way for the revised formula to be put to a vote at next week’s meeting of the Parliament in Strasbourg. Martin Schulz, the Parliament’s president, gave his backing to the compromise deal this morning at a meeting with Enda Kenny, Ireland’s prime minister, representing the member states, and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission.
“This is not an easy compromise, I must fight in the European Parliament for a majority,” Schulz said.
Kenny agreed to more flexibility to shift unspent funds between budget headings and fiscal years – a core demand of Parliament – and to frontload (ie, bring forward in the seven-year budget period) funding foreseen for youth employment, research, the Erasmus student exchange scheme, and support to small and medium-sized enterprises.
Barroso said that there was more flexibility both on the budgeted commitments (ie, undertakings to pay) and on actual payments. Unused payment appropriations in any budget year can be fully rolled over to the next year in 2014-17; after that, each year has a ceiling for such roll-overs – €7bn for 2018, €9bn for 2019, and €10bn for 2020. unused commitment appropriations from 2014-17 may be used, from 2016, for policies to do with growth and employment. Barroso said that member states that wish to increase European aid to the most deprived were being given greater freedom to do so.
The member states also provided assurances to Schulz and to Alain Lamassoure, the Parliament’s budget negotiator, that there would be a substantial mid-term review of the multi-annual financial framework, another core demand from Parliament. Schulz also claimed an advance in that the post-2020 multi-annual financial framework would be aligned with the EU’s institutional calendar and run for five rather than seven years.
Linked to the discussions on the 2014-20 budget, which amounts to €960 billion, is an agreement on amending the annual budget for 2013. On the European Commission’s request for an additional €11.2bn to cover outstanding payments during the 2013 budget year, the member states agreed to adopt a first instalment, of €7.3bn, no later than a meeting of finance ministers on 9 July.
On the balance, they committed themselves to consider new figures on outstanding payment claims that the Commission is asked to submit in “the early autumn”.
Barroso read out part of the text of the agreement on 2013, saying: “The Council commits [itself] to decide without delay on a further draft amending budget to avoid any shortfall in justified payment appropriations.”
The Parliament and the Council will now each take steps to advance the revised deal on the 2014-20 budget through their decision-making machinery. The Parliament has convened a meeting of the leaders of the political groups this morning, which is asked to approve putting the budget on to the agenda of next week’s plenary session of the Parliament. There will be a special meeting of the Parliament’s budget committee in Strasbourg on Monday (1 July).
The plenary vote, likely to be held on Wednesday, will be on a general political resolution to approve the deal. Votes on the legal texts would happen after the summer break.
On the Council’s side, the deal will be put to a special meeting of member states’ ambassadors in Brussels tomorrow (28 June). Unanimous approval is required from the Council of Ministers and formal adoption would come after the Parliament’s vote.
Kenny said: “We can bring all the member states with us on this.”
Schulz said: “This is now a question of mutual trust. I hope that all member states will follow one member state – Ireland – who did a great job.” He said: “I can live with the result and I will fight for the result.”
He said the Parliament’s main demand had been “to make sure that the €908bn foreseen in payments are really available”, and that this demand had now been met through greater flexibility and a revision clause.
Failure to reach a deal today, before next week’s plenary and before Ireland hands over the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers to Lithuania, would have greatly complicated spending from 1 January 2014.
Today’s meeting had been convened by Barroso as a last chance to agree a deal before the institutions’ summer break.
A compromise deal struck last week between Lamassoure and Eamon Gilmore, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, unravelled when a majority of political groups in the Parliament came out to oppose it, saying that Parliament’s demands had not been met.
The €960 billion budget had been agreed by member states’ leaders at a summit in February, but rejected by the Parliament in March.
Helping the Roma people to climb out of poverty is not only the right thing to do, but also makes economic sense for Europe
It was an impressive group of young men and women who gathered on Europe Day last month at the World Bank Group’s office in Bucharest. The young professionals, who live in many central and eastern European countries, had gone from university to jobs as lawyers, IT specialists, architects and entrepreneurs.
They had two things in common. First, they had overcome the social stigma and challenges of growing up as one of Europe’s estimated 12 million Roma, and second, they had benefited from the Roma Education Fund, started in 2005 by the World Bank Group and the Open Society Institute.
These young scholarship recipients represent a marked contrast to common negative stereotypes of ‘gypsies’. Instead, they represent a vision of a Europe that nurtures the talents of all citizens, and they are proof that when they have opportunities to develop their talents, Roma people can achieve remarkable results.
While the headlines in Europe focus on the eurozone’s short-term economic issues, the long-term goal of integrating the Roma people slowly simmers in the background, largely forgotten but still one of Europe’s greatest challenges.
The Roma people are one of Europe’s poorest but fastest-growing communities. Three out of four live in poverty, one in three goes to bed hungry at least once a month, and almost half live in segregated communities.
Partnering with Europe’s Roma so that they climb out of poverty is not only the right thing to do – it is smart economics for Europe. The labour force in central and eastern Europe is shrinking rapidly while the Roma population is growing. In Bulgaria, Roma are expected to make up 23% of new labour-market entrants by 2020. Clearly, much of the future competitiveness of countries in the region may depend on how rapidly they integrate Roma.
The reality is not encouraging. Only half of Roma men and a quarter of Roma women in Europe have jobs.
Europe needs a European-wide focus on Roma integration. If Roma are to take part as equals in European prosperity, they need opportunities, training and acceptance, starting at the pre-school age. Enabling more Roma children to attend pre-school and mainstreamed primary schools can equip them with the skills needed to participate fully in the labour market. With more Roma children in school and university, everyone succeeds: countries will improve their work force, which attracts businesses, which creates jobs. That is a smart investment.
There are signs of hope for Roma. In 2005, the World Bank was joined George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Swiss Agency for Development and Co-operation and central and eastern European governments in launching the ‘Decade of Roma inclusion’ aimed at highlighting the need to integrate Roma. And policymakers in Europe have made Roma inclusion a priority, as seen with the EU’s framework for ‘national Roma integration strategies up to 2020’.
Meanwhile, the World Bank Group is partnering with the European Commission and the EU states in central and eastern Europe to support Roma. We are also working with Bulgaria and Romania on early-childhood education for Roma, improving the delivery of local schools in Serbia, boosting school outcomes in FYR Macedonia, and supporting land registration in Romania.
Much more can be done. Centuries of prejudice must be overcome by consistent leadership. First, central and eastern European countries have a historic opportunity to take advantage of the next seven-year EU budget for the less-developed members of the EU to improve Roma integration. The funds are there – they just need to be put into action. Second, the rising young Roma professionals should join with the older Roma leaders to make change happen.
We heard from a dozen of those potential young leaders last month in Bucharest. But we need to support so many more young Roma. It is not only the right thing to do for this beleaguered community – it is also smart economics for Europe’s future.
Jim Yong Kim is president of the World Bank Group and James Wolfensohn was the World Bank’s president from 1995 to 2005 and currently is chairman of Wolfensohn & Company, LLC.