The year 2010 marks the halfway point of the Decade of Roma Inclusion. It is a logical place for the 12 participating Decade countries to assess their progress to date so they can ensure that their initiatives are on track and are effective, and that conditions for the 4.5 million Roma who live in these countries are improving.

Yet five years later, the lack of data about Roma communities remains the biggest obstacle to conducting any thorough assessment of how governments are meeting their Decade commitments, despite widespread agreement among participating governments about the crucial need to generate data disaggregated for ethnicity in order to assess and guide policies.

 

This data deficit prompted the Open Society Foundations’ Roma Initiatives to ask the basic questions that guided this report: What are the barriers to governments compiling or generating data disaggregated for ethnicity? Do such data even exist? If so, have governments collected disaggregated data to assess progress? Have governments made the necessary changes in their practices to ensure that this can be done, and that data are available? Are there other organizations (NGOs, policy institutes, multilateral and intergovernmental agencies) that are producing quality data that could help states to measure progress?

 

These questions were applied to the current context in which censuses continue to be the main instruments that countries use to collect disaggregated data on their populations, yet current census practices result in an undercount of Roma.