Empower 450 Vulnerable Children & Families

Dear Supporter,

TIPA team is most grateful for your precious contribution in these difficult times.

The COVID-19 lockdown has had an important impact on vulnerable children and parents: children have had difficulties to access educational material online or on TV, thus resulting in an increase in educational inequalities, and parents have been facing increased stress in the crisis. 

Since the lockdown, TIPA team focused on the 3 following actions:

• creation of children’s arts activities to allow them to express themselves and to know their rights and responsibilities.These activities were shared with parents online and with on-field trained parents to do arts activities with children in their community.
• support to parents during online discussions on the challenges they faced in raising their children, and through training and sharing sessions in “parenting skills”
• training of 6 parents to become community coordinators to conduct art activities with children in their community

These 6 parents are mothers of vulnerable children we work with. During the training, they understood how to plan and assess art activities, how to encourage children to participate and how to give them value so as to build self confidence.   The trained parents now carry out afterschool activities in the ZEP schools where TIPA intervenes and in the community with other vulnerable children, they also participate with TIPA team in the planning of activities for other vulnerable parents. TIPA remunerates them for their services to the community and we provide regular follow-up in this empowerment process. TIPA team feels priviledged to have them acting as local partners on the field and we are thrilled to feel their motivation and see how committed they are.

In the current context, TIPA activities aim to increase the resilience of vulnerable families: children and parents need ongoing support to sustainably develop skills such as self-confidence and emotional management, which are essential to cope with stress during the Covid19 crisis.

This is why your continued support is so important and means so much to us. Thank you

Dear Supporter,

Thank you for your continued support which means even more now than ever!

In Mauritius, just like everywhere else in the world, the past few months have been unique. Due to Covid-19, we have been confined for two months and a half, with schools closed more than 3 months and a half. In this context, we had to reinvent our interventions.

As we could no longer reach children in schools, we decided to reach them through their parents. From the safety of our homes, we have created artistic activities to help children express themselves, and know their rights and responsibilities. These activities have been shared with parents online, and they are currently shared with volunteers on the field, now that we are no longer locked down.

Online meetings with parents were carried out so as to support them in this difficult time. Together, we discussed the issues they were facing regarding the education of their children, in this particular context. As we are working with vulnerable families, for many of them, internet access is limited, which prevented many children to access educational resources. We also organised training and sharing online sessions for parents on parenting skills, to help them navigate this difficult time.

As vulnerable children have had less access to educational materials than others, the educational gap will have grown after more than 3 months away from school. This is why we are training parents so that they can carry out afterschool activities with children in the community when schools reopen.

Since the end of the lockdown, our art facilitators have also been on the field to reach 25 children from vulnerable families. These families have been evicted from their homes from one day to the other, with no solution provided by the State, while Mauritius was still under lockdown. TIPA has designed specific activities so as to help these children process this overwhelming situation while having a good time. We have also been distributing basic kits of artistic materials to parents so that they can carry out activities with their children.

While we will go back to schools as soon as possible after their reopening on the 1^st of July, we will ensure that vulnerable children receive extra support through their parents and the community so as to reduce the educational gap which we fear has grown during the lockdown: afterschool activities with trained parents from the community will be organised, while we will continue to organise online support groups for parents.

We hope we can count on your support in these challenging times for NGOs funding, so that we can continue to reach children who need it the most.

Links:

• TIPA's 2019 Annual Report
• Artistic activity
• Artistic Activity