Tamás Ragadics (p)

Katalin Füzér

Perception of Pandemic in Rural Hungary

Problems and Solutions in minor Settlements of Sellye district

Sellye district in South Transdanubia in Hungary is one of the country’s marginalised regions characterised by small villages far from economic centres. The number of local workplaces has dropped dramatically following the change of the political regime, and the opportunities of commuting have become limited as well. The structure of village societies has changed: the educated and young residents have moved away, the proportion of disadvantaged population has increased. There is a significant ethnical segregation of the Roma population and an increasing marginalization of the rural underclass. The majority of inhabitants perceive their dwelling space as a trap situation because of the big distance from services, educational, social and healthcare institutions and workplaces.
During the pandemic in 2020-21, habitual ordinary frames of life changed drastically and social traps deepened in rural Hungary. Some of the rural social integration projects stopped or were reduced by social workers complying with the governmental regulations of social distancing.
This presentation aims to introduce the outcomes of a survey carried out in three minor settlements of Sellye district in 2021. Subjects of the research were families living in disadvantageous status. Our questions focused on the most pressing problems they had to face and the attempts they made to solve them during the pandemic. We were primarily interested in the changes of living conditions, family relations and labour status in connection with the changing conditions of everyday life.
The main focus of research was family life. The presentation offers an overview of the following questions and topics: Which are the major problems in the life of families? How can people solve these problems? Which are the supporting factors in the life of inhabitants? What were the most pressing problems of families in everyday life, work and social connections in the pandemic period? In what sense has life changed in families during the pandemic?
The findings of our research project are hoped to contribute to providing a more effective and complex social care in rural Hungary.

Keywords: marginalized families, minor settlements, pandemic, perception of problems, rural Hungary

Eszter Bucher (p)

Tamás Ragadics

Emerging and support programs funded by the European Union and the Hungarian government have been running for several decades in the settlements of disadvantaged areas, including Ormánság, which serves as the analysis / research field of the lecture. The lecture examines the current Infinite Opportunity District and the Emerging Settlements program. The presentation presents the Emerging Settlements programs and their outlined results through the Presence Points programs run by the Catholic Caritas. The presentation covers the responses of the
Presence Points to the Covid epidemic. The coronavirus epidemic that broke out in 2019 affected the settlements and the Emerging Settlements programs taking place there in all respects. This was perhaps most evident in digital skills, lack of tools and Internet services, and other competencies. The charitable / non-governmental organizations operating in the area of Ormánság helped the local community with programs, tools, internet, workshop and workshop-type activities, and small community programs.
The lecture focuses on two small settlements: Kisszentmárton and Téseny. The examined settlements are, on the one hand, typical small villages in Ormánság (in terms of population and economic indicators), and, on the other hand, small settlements with segregation. The settlements are among the settlements with a moderate to small population decline in regional terms. In the context of the segregation of the Gypsy population in the examined settlements, we can speak of villages with a young age structure, where the proportion of the population with a disadvantaged, low education and poor labor market situation is high. (Ragadics 2019) (Boros-Bucher 2020)

Katalin Füzér (p), Bence Völgyi (p), Eszter Bucher, Tamás Ragadics, Julianna Boros, Luca Werner

Eszter Bucher

Our paper studies the intersection of conventional social disparities and the digital divide in the context of post-COVID rural Hungary. We focus on the policy potential of digital inclusion interventions in social inclusion programs in general and in particular on the potential they carry in improving the lives of the most deprived Hungarian rural communities.

While social inclusion policies usually target a wide array of social exclusion processes, including their various spatial implications, digital inclusion objectives are more of an exception than a convention in the policy toolkit of complex social rehabilitation programs implemented in vulnerable communities. The spatial concentration of social exclusion, segregation, is typically an urban phenomena globally but in the Hungarian (and wider Eastern European) context, rural segregation affects regionally clustered pools of rural communities. The most deprived 300 rural communities in Hungary are included in a comprehensive publicly funded Social Inclusion Program (https://fete.hu) implemented by five national charity organizations and a number of smaller charities since 2019. The program is local needs-tailored, as interventions are designed in response to an initial local social diagnosis. This policy design commitment opens the prospect of incorporating a wide array of social inclusion intervention measures, allows ample room for socially innovative solutions and creates the option for digital inclusion efforts that were shown to be most effective when tailored to local needs (Ragnedda 2020). What role does, and potentially could digital inclusion play in the intervention toolkit of professionals on the ground? To what extent are locals and helping professionals themselves connected, in possession of digital skills and in a position to reap digital dividends? Our results confirm that fundamental aspects of all three digital divides continue to be real barriers for the deprived rural communities we study. The digital posture of helping professionals, on the other hand, provides ground for designing intervention tools that would target existing potentials (such as the availability of smartphones) and assist helping professionals to become digital transformers. Our case study provides both an empirical insight into the intersection of social and digital inequalities and also informs digital inclusion policy making in deprived rural settings.