Journalist Luboš Palata has reported for news server iDNES.cz that in the Romani settlements of Slovakia, where a large portion of that country’s more than 400 000 Romani people live, the living standard is at the level of impoverished countries in the developing world. The average life expectancy for the Romani population corresponds to this fact and is currently at levels experienced by the majority population of Slovakia decades ago.
If you have the misfortune to be born in a Romani settlement in Slovakia, not only do poverty and problems with acquiring an education and work await you, but you don’t even have much of a chance of living to age 60 so you can retire. Slovak news server Romovia.sme.sk reports that a survey conducted by Slovak demographers has found that the situation in the Romani settlements is so bad that average life expectancy there is 15 years less than the average for Slovakia as a whole.
Shortened Romani life spans are not specifically a Slovak problem, as Romani people live shorter lives compared to majority populations all over Europe. Compared to the average life span, Romani people in the Czech Republic also live about 10 years less.
The European Commission has recently highlighted the unbearably bad situation of Romani people in its new Member States. While the average Slovak woman lives to be 75 and the average Slovak man lives to be 70, Romani women living in the country’s several hundred segregated settlements live to not quite 60, while Romani men live to just 55.
Slovak Roma are therefore living at the level of impoverished African countries and experience a shorter average life span than the inhabitants of Congo, for example. Experts say high infant mortality among the Romani population and shorter life spans are some of the factors that have curtailed what was once predicted to be rapid population growth by the Romani minority in Slovakia.
Romovia.sme.sk bases these findings on work performed by the Demographic Research Institute which was supervised by Branislav Šproch. His research focuses on the development of the Romani population in Slovakia.
Šproch says that even under these conditions, the number of Romani people in Slovakia is still expected to grow to 500 000 or even 640 000 by 2030, making them the most numerous minority in the country and surpassing the ethnic Hungarian population. This growth might be taking place even faster if such a large portion of Romani people were not living in such unbearable social conditions.
