Enhancing Rural Girls' Education and Wellbeing

13-06-2023

REPORT ON COMMUNITY HOME TO CREATE AWARENESS ABOUT PREVENTION OF SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND ABUSE(PSEA) FOR CHILDREN.

Hope for Children’s Health Foundation conducts home visiting programs with parenting families to ensure vulnerable children are prevented from sexual abuse through community awareness campaigns with an aim of improving on the parenting skills of their parents and caretakers.

Approach

As part of this approach, some of the information collected during home visits was compiled and reviewed by the working group. Trends and patterns were identified. This information will thenused as a valuable first-hand source to raise awareness and address issues that vulnerable families face within the wider community and also guide us during programming for future interventions.

This same information will also be collated and used as evidence-based data for advocacy initiatives at the community, district, national and international levels. Hope for Children’s Health Foundation advocacy staff and advocacy partners use this data from multiple programmes to identify trends and recurring issues, such as system and service failure. They then make strategic decisions to address these issues at the appropriate level.

The work of the home visitor was to make contribution to advocacy through:

• Influencing policy formulation and implementation based on the evidence collected.
• Raising awareness to change traditional practices that make children vulnerable.
• Monitoring the impact of policy implementation on the most vulnerable children and their families.
• Communicating existing policies and entitlements which can support the most vulnerable children and their families.
• Educating and informing people about child rights, laws and responsibilities and how to ensure these are enforced.

26 parents and caregivers were reached from 12 households and 32 beneficiaries were met to discuss and hear their views about PSEA.

Way forward

In some home visits, children registered for sponsorship are the same children identified as members of at-risk families who will be visited by home visitors. In these programmes, home visitors will effectively combine sponsorship monitoring when visiting the homes of registered children.

Appreciation:

We thank our Donors and well wishers for their continued support towards our programs aimed at reaching the most vulnerable populations and we look forward for more support to reach every child because they matter.

• Report (PDF)