BOSNIA GLOBAL GRANT

This is an information and update  site for  Rotary grants to promote basic education for rural and Roma girls in Bosnia and to warn and educate participants about human trafficking. Bosnia never recovered from the wars of the 1990's and is now the poorest country in Europe. It is the largest source of trafficked girls in Europe. Global grants are especially large grants in specific areas of focus that match Rotary International Foundation funds with donations raised by local Rotary clubs. 

The site  is managed by Felicia Muftic, member of the Rotary Club of Denver and the USA contact person for the grant.   Please feel free to explore the site and we will attempt to keep it up to date.

WHY THE PROJECT?

Rural cultural prejudices held by all ethnic groups  in Bosnia  give preference to  educating boys, especially so  when resources are tight.  100,000 Roma natives of the area, provide little or no education  for their girls. Bosnia is the poorest country in Europe, having never recovered from the 1990's wars made famous by the term "ethnic cleansing". 

Human trafficking and education are closely connected. Bosnia is the major source of trafficked humans in Europe.Roma are the largest group of victims. Government actions to eliminate trafficking  in passing helpful legislation or prosecuting traffickers or working  with NGO services to rescue trafficked victims  have been severely lacking  due to "corruption and involvement of public officials " in trafficking. The Rotary Global Grants are  aimed at prevention by promoting potential victims to stay in school to be employable later and by warning them and their families of how traffickers recruit for both sex and labor related exploitation.

In 2014 the US State Department issued their TiPs report (Trafficking in Persons) and Bosnia was ranked in the group Tier 2 Watch List, next to the lowest in the world in their failure of their government to curb and prosecute traffickers. In 2015, the ranking improved to Tier 2 because of the efforts of the government against forced labor trafficking, but still nothing was done to take action against sex trafficking .  Corruption and involvement of public officials were cited as the reasons. Roma girls were still very at risk. (www.state.gov/documents/organization/243558.pdf)

The problem of human trafficking persists into 2017, still in Tier 2 in the TiPS report: "The Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. The government demonstrated increasing efforts compared to the previous reporting period; therefore, Bosnia and Herzegovina remained on Tier 2. The government demonstrated increasing efforts by the Federation Parliament’s adoption of a human trafficking law consistent with the laws of the state, Republika Srpska, and Brcko District. The state and Brcko District courts sentenced officials complicit in human trafficking offenses and continued law enforcement cooperation with foreign governments. However, the government did not meet the minimum standards in several key areas. The victim referral mechanism lacked formal procedures and did not establish roles and responsibilities for relevant actors. Victims required official recognition from authorities to access support and assistance" For the full report of the reasons,go to https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/271341.pdf and scroll to Bosnia and Herzogvina

While  Bosnia has been moved  to a rung up from the near bottom of the US State Department evaluation of government action in stopping human trafficking , it  is because it took action on some  labor trafficking.  Sex trafficking remains an undiminshed problem. Local NGO Novi Put's President told me recently that notices are appearing  publicly advertising for high salaries for those who sign up to be "escorts" so that another round of a similar global grant is still very much needed. The economic picture in Bosnia has not improved. 

THE GRANTS 

This effort was begun in 2013-14 by a cash grant totalling  $2700 from Mostar Rotary, Rotary Club of Boulder (Colorado) and Denver Rotary to equip the donated office/counseling center for Novi Put in Mostar. The next step was the first Rotary International global grant  to serve canton Neretva ( Mostar region) and the  second one was approved in 2017 for the neighboring canton, Sarajevo.

Funds from the Rotary International foundation matched contributions by cash contributions from nine US and international Rotary clubs. Local club and administrator on site is the Rotary Club of Mostar. Bosnia. Mostar Rotary contracted with a local non profit, Novi Put, to implement the grants. Supervision of program and expenditures and reporting to Rotary International is performed by a Mostar Rotary club grant administrator funded by the grants. Funding from all of the sources for both grants totals $90,000 US. The first  global grant was completed in 2015  and the second is being currently being implemented during the 2017-2018 school year.

When all grants have been completed,  parent teacher meetings (also called workshops)will have been held in 44 rural villages and Roma camps, reaching 2000 families. 160 families  with girls at risk of dropping out of school in their 4th grade will have been mentored by 40 university student volunteers trained in counseling and supervised  by the contracted NGO Novi Put. The purpose is to encourage the girls to stay in school and to divert them from being victims of trafficking.  Each mentor will follow and counsel the families for three years. 30 Roma girls will have received a year of literacy training, enabling them to continue their education in local public schools. Local and national media coverage of the projects and public education campaign will have reached the entire country of nearly 4 million people. 

The program will continue after the grants. Felicia Muftic visited Mostar and Novi Put in June, 2018.  The exchange of emails and report tells much:

 

Rotary International  approved a duplicate of the first grant for another canton: Sarajevo, which has been funded and approved and is being executed  for the school year beginning fall 2017. That grant number  is #GG1638559.  

Grant #GG141619 :The first grant was for Canton Neretva (Mostar area). It began implementation in 2014.

EVALUATION OF THE FIRST GLOBAL GRANT

In the summer 2015, Sydney Streicher, a student at the University of Vienna and a native of Centennial, Colorado, spent 3 weeks in Bosnia producing a video of interviews of participants in the grant.  The format is exit interviews, but these pictures are worth a thousand words to evaluate and demonstrate  the effectiveness of the grant to accomplish its goals. The second grant will be evaluated by exit interviews of the participants. The 20 minute video is available on You Tube . Copy and paste the link on your URL browser.  The link is    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsBKARQST7Y&featur

 In the final report of the first global grant what stood out was not only the success of the Roma literacy  project, but also of the mentoring program. More girls and more interns participated than we originally planned, but since the program was conducted  mostly by volunteer student interns, the program was expanded to meet demand of both parents and students within the grant budget. It will continue through 2018. In addition, the intern mentors also met with their students much more frequently than we had originally planned, often weekly instead of quarterly. The interns reported, too, that many of the girls mentored were considering dropping out of school, but interns helped them with their homework in addition to becoming their friends, and the girls stayed in school. As with the first grant, the mentors work with the families for at least three years. The press coverage of the program was widespread in the local media so that the message of staying in school and not becoming a victim of human trafficking reached the entire national and local media.   markets. http://www.bosniaglobalgrant.com/progress_report_to_rotary_international_year_end_august_2015

While not reported in the final report, Bosnia has been moved from the near bottom of the US State Department evaluation of government action in stopping human trafficking to a rung up, but just for labor trafficking.  Sex trafficking remains an undiminshed problem.  Novi Put President told me recently that notices are appearing  publicly advertising for high salaries for those who sign up to be "escorts" so that another round of a similar global grant is still very much needed. The economic picture in Bosnia has not improved. Continuing need for the grant to serve other areas in Bosnia resulted in the second grant.

TERMINOLOGY 
The grant approved by Rotary International is a Global Grant,  a new program  initiated  by Rotary International in 2013 for larger grants.  Among its areas of focus is promoting basic education of girls and gender equality.  https://www.rotary.org/en/our-programs/grants

Novi Put is also known as New Road.  Link to their site is www.newroadbih.org       Click the translate buttons.  The grants use their local language name Novi Put . Novi Put is also a counseling and advocacy agency for both promoting education and providing counseling services for victims of domestic violence, trafficking and pedophilia . Their funding comes from various sources including Mostar Rotary, that administers the global grant funds. The global grants provide the upfront costs of expanding their goals of promoting education and preventing human trafficking.  Novi Put relies heavily on volunteers, with core direction and support of a professional staff of educators and psychologists.

Cantons are the equivalent of US states in their federal/state form of government. 

BiH is the  Bosnian language abbreviation of the formal name of the country: Bosnia and Herzegovina. For simplicity  the grant uses Bosnia  as a shorthand  to refer to the whole country. 

DDF   District designated funds: Source of Rotary district funds, Rotary International Foundation based on district member contributions to the foundation.

FUNDING THE GRANTS

The lead club and largest single contributor  is Denver Rotary. Felicia Muftic, a member of the club, and a resident of Fraser, Colorado, served as the project grant writer and champion, with assistance from husband Dr. Michael Muftic, a native of Croatia, a country  that neighbors Bosnia. The Muftics had been frequent visitors to Bosnia over the past forty years.Dr. Muftic passed away in August, 2015.  Felicia Muftic first visited Bosnia in 1959 during her junior year abroad in Germany and completed  independent studies in Balkan history in her senior year at  Northwestern University.

THE FIRST  GLOBAL GRANT (CANTON NERETVA)

This first grant for Canton Neretva was executed and final report approved in 2016.

May 23,2014. A Rotary  grant of $45,275  USD to promote basic education and literacy for rural girls in Bosnia was approved by the Rotary International Foundation in Evanston, Illinois. .  The  Rotary grant reviewer called the project  “innovative and an important effort”.

 Contributing  a total of  $16,850 cash toward Rotary International matching funds  for the first grant were nine different  Colorado Rotary  clubs and Rotary clubs of  Grand Cayman (British West Indies) and  Mostar (Bosnia). The Rotary District of 5450 (northern Colorado) provided $10,000 and the Rotary International Foundation matched it with $18,425 as well as with a similar amount for the second grant. Details of the funding sources for the first grant are at the end of this page.

 THE SECOND  GLOBAL GRANT (CANTON SARAJEVO)

The second grant included many of the first grant club contributors , District 5450,  In addition the Rotary Club of Ojai California and their district 5240 contributed  significantly. Colorado clubs included Denver, Denver Mile Hi, Boulder, Summit (Frisco), Breckenridge Mountain, Winter Park/Fraser Valley, Granby, Grand Lake, and Kremmling. 

 

Dear Felicia,

All project activities are implemented as originally planned. We have an excellent cooperation with all school prinicipals and councilors involved in the project due to relevance of the activities.

Earlier this month police conducted a big raid at a night club in Sarajevo where they found dozens of very young girls, even some minors, who were recruited to provide sexual services.

http://avaz.ba/vijesti/crna-hronika/349921/detalji-iz-bordela-%E2%80%9Corlando%E2%80%9D-bludnicenje-uglednika-uz-afrodizijake-i-prostitutke

We discussed the issue of human trafficking at our schools and realized that underage girls have become very vulnerable to HT. During the street campaigns we learned horrible things about sexual exploitation of not only girls and young men but also of children (even boys) by foreign tourists and we will discuss it during the next meeting of the anti-trafficking referral group and the regional monitoring team. We will also report all our findings to the Ministry of Security and the Cantonal Ministry of Education Sarajevo.

During the lectures held so far, we learned that many girls as young as 12 have already become victims of abuse through internet and we are asked by many schools to hold awareness raising lectures so we will held more lectures than originally planned, as they are afraid that eventually girls may start dropping out from school due to mocking or condemnation.

Tomorrow we will have 2 lectures in Sarajevo and we will try to meet with the State Coordinator for anti-trafficking activities to brief him about our findings in Sarajevo Canton.

Sarajevo has become a real jungle and this has been the second large case of recruiting girls and minors in provision of sexual services in the past 2 years (http://bnn.ba/vijesti/holiday-inn-potvrdena-optuznica-protiv-12-osoba) and our project has been welcomed by many schools.

Even though we planned to have 80 mentees and 20 mentors, we have 32 mentors – students from the Sarajevo University and 115 girls from 8 elementary schools, the Sarajevo orphanage and the Family Center of the SOS Kinderdorf who provides assistance to most vulnerable categories.

Since those girls are very vulnerable to all forms of abuse and we are now trying to empower them through our project with a great assistance of school councilors both the school principals and councilors allowed students to take some photo of the mentoring events but they kindly asked not to publish those photos on internet in order not to victimize the girls, as it may get a contra effect.

Photos from the lectures held at schools can be published on internet (especially those taken from the back of classrooms where faces of children are not visible) but the photos from mentoring events should be shared only internally. As for photos from the literacy course, nobody asked us not to publish them, but perhaps for the sake of child protection those photos should not be published, too. Authorities in Sarajevo are very strict when it comes to taking photos of children, I wish they were as strict when it comes to actual protection of minors.

The literacy course is ongoing, girls are really sweet and motivated and we are currently planing more lectures at schools. 

Best regards,

Dear Felicia,

All project activities are implemented as originally planned. We have an excellent cooperation with all school prinicipals and councilors involved in the project due to relevance of the activities.

Earlier this month police conducted a big raid at a night club in Sarajevo where they found dozens of very young girls, even some minors, who were recruited to provide sexual services.

http://avaz.ba/vijesti/crna-hronika/349921/detalji-iz-bordela-%E2%80%9Corlando%E2%80%9D-bludnicenje-uglednika-uz-afrodizijake-i-prostitutke

We discussed the issue of human trafficking at our schools and realized that underage girls have become very vulnerable to HT. During the street campaigns we learned horrible things about sexual exploitation of not only girls and young men but also of children (even boys) by foreign tourists and we will discuss it during the next meeting of the anti-trafficking referral group and the regional monitoring team. We will also report all our findings to the Ministry of Security and the Cantonal Ministry of Education Sarajevo.

During the lectures held so far, we learned that many girls as young as 12 have already become victims of abuse through internet and we are asked by many schools to hold awareness raising lectures so we will held more lectures than originally planned, as they are afraid that eventually girls may start dropping out from school due to mocking or condemnation.

Tomorrow we will have 2 lectures in Sarajevo and we will try to meet with the State Coordinator for anti-trafficking activities to brief him about our findings in Sarajevo Canton.

Sarajevo has become a real jungle and this has been the second large case of recruiting girls and minors in provision of sexual services in the past 2 years (http://bnn.ba/vijesti/holiday-inn-potvrdena-optuznica-protiv-12-osoba) and our project has been welcomed by many schools.

Even though we planned to have 80 mentees and 20 mentors, we have 32 mentors – students from the Sarajevo University and 115 girls from 8 elementary schools, the Sarajevo orphanage and the Family Center of the SOS Kinderdorf who provides assistance to most vulnerable categories.

Since those girls are very vulnerable to all forms of abuse and we are now trying to empower them through our project with a great assistance of school councilors both the school principals and councilors allowed students to take some photo of the mentoring events but they kindly asked not to publish those photos on internet in order not to victimize the girls, as it may get a contra effect.

Photos from the lectures held at schools can be published on internet (especially those taken from the back of classrooms where faces of children are not visible) but the photos from mentoring events should be shared only internally. As for photos from the literacy course, nobody asked us not to publish them, but perhaps for the sake of child protection those photos should not be published, too. Authorities in Sarajevo are very strict when it comes to taking photos of children, I wish they were as strict when it comes to actual protection of minors.

The literacy course is ongoing, girls are really sweet and motivated and we are currently planing more lectures at schools. 

Best regards,

Ada  

.