Build a school for 400 vulnearble kids in Uganda

We are happy to note down the little progress on some of the activities we carried out, failed and learnt lessons to inform our planning.

In the community we work, we are constructing a home for 50 kids, by November this year we will be putting up metalic windows and doors, we are doing all these because we want our children to be protected from harm and or abuse, in our community there are over 200 needy children living in 500 households, 80% of the children are abused and the very abusers are sometimes their own parents, we carried out several other sensitizations in our community to curb child abuse, in carrying out these activities during this quarter, Mountains of Hope carried out a mini survey on child protection issues to assess the cases of child abuse in relation to the reported ones, it was learnt that data on child abuse cases reported by community during child protection meetings varied with the police report in terms of figures and information.

Mountains of Hope used to rely on the reports of the village/community meetings alone, it was difficult to follow up on some cases with the police as the police was not aware of some cases we were following up, we discovered that these lower level cases were solved by the community locally without reaching police, this hampered the follow up process, a case in point is where a school girl that was defiled in one of the communities was not reported to police and none of the authorities neither our staff knew about it but the community was aware about it, the case was handled locally by the parents of the victim and those of the defiler who later on were not willing to release information on how it went about.

Mountains of Hope in an attempt to make its monitoring systems stronger leant that there was a weak partnership and linkages among agencies involved in Child protection including Mountains of Hope. A partner’s meet up was organized and systems availed for who does what? What resources are needed? When? And How?

So far in this new partnership, our project has been assigned the duty of mobilizing sensitization community meetings on child protection issues in the community as the police child protection and welfare office does the sensitizations.

This has eased provision of information as our project can easily get the right data from police office other than relying on the data provided by only the village committees, this information derived from the police helps to inform our planning process in the community we work, this has enabled us to target the activities that are beneficial to our community, a case in point is when we planned for the provision of sanitary pads to 50 school girls after a thorough sensitization carried out by the Mpigi District Health Officer and Police Child protection officer with facilitation from Mountains of Hope with Globalgiving donors.