Romania is still in pain and misery, all thanks to the reign of communism that lasted for 40 years and a further 2 decades of free market corruption. All this left Romania in a mess where they had to reconstruct social services and Civil Society from scratch.

Due to these western “market led” reforms introduced by the International Monetary Foundation threw Romania back years and resulted in people of Romania becoming 800% poorer than before. Though a few managed to survive, there was never enough to live a stable life.

Because of all this, everyone suffered, including the sick, the poor, and the elderly; and above all, those who had to live in grossly under-funded state institutions suffered a great deal. Today, we work with those former Romanian Orphans; they managed to survive but transitioned from state orphanages to adult institutions.

A look on economic indicators report would show Romania to be placed near Columbian and Namibia.

Now, after a devastating financial crisis, a social, economic and political crisis has taken over the whole country. In fact, the government had to borrow from the International Monetary Funds to overcome the problems caused by huge budget deficits in 2010.

Note 1:
One in every five children is exploited in Romania. There are over 5M children and over 300,000 are compelled to undertake agricultural and other types of hard labour. Most of these kids cannot read as they have to leave school to “do their job”.
As many as 89% of these exploited kids are from rural environments; poverty is the underlying factor leading to this exploitation.
Report by UNICEF, Ministry of Labour Romania and the Bureau of International Labour Affairs

Note 2:
More than 66% of paupers are from rural areas; the risk of poverty in these areas is twice as high when compared to cities. Geographically, around 25% of paupers in Romania are from northeastern province of Moldova; the risk of poverty in this province is 43%. It means, one fith of the paupers are pensioners, while another 20% are farmers.
The worst effected populations are of children or of those between the age 15-24 (40%), which is followed by retired personnel (20%), farmers (20%), employees (10%) and unemployed (9%).