Serbia’s Minister without Portfolio in charge of EU integration Jadranka Joksimovic and Council of Europe Development Bank official Stephan Sellen signed on Tuesday an donation agreement worth EUR 26.7 million that will help provide housing for 1,585 of the poorest refugee families.
The Regional Housing Fund will supply EUR 22.5 million in donations, while the rest will come from the Serbian government, Joksimovic said after the signing.
This important project will begin in two weeks, when the first prefabricated homes and construction material are delivered to the families, she stated.
There are 16,780 refugee families in Serbia who are in dire need of assistance and should get a roof over their heads in the next 5 years, she said, adding that there was a total of around 27,000 such families in the four countries of the region.
A donor conference resulted in EUR 583 million for providing housing for those families and Serbia will get EUR 335 million of that sum, Joksimovic pointed out.
Refugee Commissioner Vladimir Cucic said Serbia there were 24 collective accommodation centres for refugees in Serbia at the moment, with13 in central Serbia and 11 in Kosovo.
Those centres house less than 400 refugees and nearly 1,700 internally displaced persons from Kosovo who need to be taken care of as soon as possible, he noted.
The centres in central Serbia will be shut down in the near future, he says, but he does not expect the centres in Kosovo to close as well, because the authorities in Pristina are not interested in the issue and the international community is not providing the necessary support.
Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to Serbia Oscar Benedict said the EU was the biggest donor of the Regional Housing Fund, seeing as it provided 73.4 percent of the total funds for projects.
Source in Serbia
