Providing housing in the Balkans

Mira fled Croatia, her home country, in 1995 due to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and now lives in Serbia. She applied to the Regional Housing Programme (RHP) after one of her neighbours, who like Mira is a single mother, received a house through the Programme.

Mira now owns the village house that she had been renting for decades, thanks to the Programme, which purchased the house from its previous owner. “It is the first time I’ve had something of my own. I’m really happy”, she smiles. After years of housing insecurity, homeownership thanks to RHP donor funds has given Mira a newfound sense of tranquillity: “I fall asleep peacefully when I go to bed.”

Owning her home has provided Mira with more than just a place to stay. Mira now also grows vegetables and raises piglets on her land, which she then sells to supplement her income as a janitor at the town’s school. “By selling vegetables from the greenhouse this winter, spring and summer, I made enough money to buy some pigs. I bought a sow, so now I have some piglets. We sold most of them, but kept two.

Mira also intends to open a village store in a shed next to her house. This initiative would serve the whole village and illustrates the wide-ranging benefits of the RHP. “There is no shop in the village, and the village could really use one. I think it would be great.”

Mira Mihajlovic, beneficiary from Serbia (youtube.com)

Completed in 2023 after more than a decade of implementation, the Regional Housing Programme provided housing to 36 000 highly vulnerable people who had been living in substandard accommodation after being displaced during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Implemented by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, the RHP was managed by the CEB with financial support from the EU, the Programme’s largest donor, as well as the United States, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Türkiye, Luxembourg, Spain, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and the Slovak Republic. More information can be found here: regionalhousingprogramme.org