It is #ChildProtectionWeek 2015 in South Africa and Abba Adoptions will be involved in several outreach projects this week. Keep an eye on our Twitter-feed @abbaadoptions for updates.
And remember to wear your green ribbon in support of Child Protection Week!
Abba Adoptions is very proud to be an active partner of the National Adoption Coalition of South Africa (NACSA).
NACSA recently announced the launch of
Courage, an innovative child protection community engagement programme aimed at
empowering communities to identify and solve their child protection challenges.
Herewith an extract of the official press release:
"Courage was developed through a partnership
between NACSA, the Swedish Foundation for Children without Parental Care (Foraldraslosa
barn) and project leader Dee Blackie, a child protection and change management
specialist.
Courage is a
picture based programme that uses posters, maps and a range of interactive training
material to assist child protection officers, organisations, families and
individuals to engage around the issues they face in their communities. It helps participants to recognise the rights
and needs of children, to identify and prioritise their child protection
challenges and then gives them the strategies and tools they need to solve them. The material can be used for a range of
different purposes including:
- Prevention Programmes: Communication and awareness; advocacy; and capacity building.
- Early Intervention: Sex, conception & pregnancy awareness; option counselling for crisis pregnancy; strategies for positive parenting; and individual or community empowerment.
- Statutory Intervention: Child abandonment management, counselling of parents & children, court preparation; and stakeholder management.
- Child Placement: Alternative care solutions; and adoption counselling.
“We decided
to call the programme ‘Courage’ as we wanted to develop it as a positive and
inspiring ‘ingredient’ in any community or child protection organisation. When we asked social workers, psychologists, teachers,
healthcare practitioners and police, all of them said they needed courage to
deal with the child protection challenges that they face every day, and with
that the brand was born”, explains Dee Blackie, global project leader.
Work on
Courage started a year ago, when AdoptionCentrum Sweden secured funding to
assist with the development of a holistic child protection programme that could
be used throughout their global network.
Christina Gibson of Foraldraslosa barn explains their motivation for
partnering with NACSA: “We wanted a toolkit that could be used anywhere in the
world, that was user friendly and could help with capacity building of our stakeholders. This tool would also need to strengthen the
knowledge, attitude and skills of duty bearers to apply a legally secure
caretaking system for children without parental care or at risk, and we believe
Courage is just that toolkit”.
“Many child
protection programmes are reactive and only serve to solve problems that
already exist”, says Katinka Pieterse, Chair of NACSA, “the beauty of the
Courage-programme is that it focuses on proactive and preventative solutions”.
“Courage is aligned to Global, African and South African children’s rights
declarations, and it also makes the implementation of the South African Children’s
Act very practical and easy to apply,” adds Pieterse.
South Africa
has 18.6 million children, which represents 36% of our total population. Over a million children are born every year,
however, they face a number of challenges.
Violence and violence-related injury is amongst the highest in the world
in South Africa and is deeply embedded in our culture due to our troubled past. The dominance of patriarchy in our
communities tends to devalue the role of women and children, which has led to very
high levels of domestic violence and abuse.
Social services lack the capacity to deal with many of the child
protection challenges that they are faced with and poverty and inequality
continues to hamper the majority of South African children’s development and
growth.
Courage has
been developed on the principle that all child protection challenges stem from
some form of disempowerment. It
identifies 35 distinct child protection challenges, and all of these can be summarized into seven ‘disempowerment themes’. These themes include societal violence and inequality,
exploitation, low self-esteem, abuse, addiction, ignorance and neglect. However, for each of these disempowerment
themes, there is an equally strong empowerment tool that Courage uses to drive a
change in behaviour. These empowerment
tools include developing community values or a belief set, strengthening
community partnerships, building self-esteem, encouraging love and empathy,
harnessing leadership, growing knowledge and turning strategies into tangible
action and delivery.
The Courage brand
identity was developed by Circle Design and the interactive training material
by Trainiac, a picture based training consultancy. The engagement programme was piloted in South
Africa, Zambia and Lesotho in March of this year with child protection experts
in each country. Knowledge and insight
was collected from representatives of government, social development, NGO’s,
safety and security, health and education.
The material was refined based on these pilot workshops and the final
toolkit is now available for downloading at www.couragechildprotection.com, a
printed version can also be purchased at cost price.
“Everyone has
a role to play in the protection of our children, but often the challenges seem
too great and the solutions too complex to enact real change” explains
Blackie. “Courage is a practical toolkit
that empowers individuals, families and organisations to develop and implement
simple yet effective child protection programmes in any unique environment, we call
it empowered care”.
Visit the website for all info and to download the toolkit: www.couragechildprotection.com
Also read Dee Blackie's (Child Protection Activist) blog post ahead of Child Protection Week:
http://www.couragechildprotection.com/community
Article: The Star, 01 June 2015, page 2
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