In January, nine beneficiary families moved into new Regional Housing Programme (RHP) apartments in the municipality of Sapna in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although no public ceremony could take place to commemorate the occasion due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of the moment was certainly not lost on all those concerned.

One of the RHP beneficiaries to receive keys from the municipality, Sandra Pranjić, is a single mother of a five-year-old boy. After the 1990s conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Sandra and her brother moved from the City of Tuzla, in the north-eastern part of Bosnia, to Sapna. The siblings lived in a derelict and damp house for which they still had to pay rent, and Sandra had no other choice but to work in the fields while her brother worked in construction. She says that she accepts any work that she can get in order to feed her family, and she stays optimistic. “Even though some of my neighbours told me that I had little chance of getting an apartment, I still decided to take a chance and apply,” she says.

The construction of the apartments was funded by the RHP whose largest donor is the European Union, with other key donors being Germany, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and the United States of America.