Child AidClick here to view statistics for Child Aid Projects
It is now 14 years since Humana People
to People created the Child Aid projects in response to the call from UNICEF in 1990 for actions to turn around the prospects of decline in the conditions for the World’s children.
It is needed more that ever to hold on to the long term development programs for the enhancement of the living conditions for children and their families. Recent research states direct relations between the spread and effects of HIV/AIDS and some of the most basic poverty caused conditions, such as infections carried with polluted water, worm infections and poor nutrition, facts that add new aspects and urgency to the ever ongoing fight against poverty.
Humana People to People members operate 25 Child Aid projects in 12 countries. Child Aid is an integrated part of the community wherever it operates. People - in their capacity of parents or just of their interest for the common good - organise themselves around finding solutions and creating development, which supports the children, and in turn supports everybody in the community. The approach of the Child Aid projects is a total approach - covering all aspects of life, and thus strengthening the community.
The total approach is expressed in Child Aid’s 10 lines of activities, which is the common feature for all the Child Aid projects within Humana People to People.
The 10 lines are:
1. Strengthening the economy of the families
2. Health and hygiene - hereunder the fight against HIV/AIDS
3. Pre-schools
4. Children as active in the political, social, cultural and economic sphere of society
5. Children without parents
6. Education
7. District development
8. Environment,
and in addition to these, two locally defined lines.
The 10 lines of Child Aid all deal with long-term development, which needs sustainable solutions to be found and implemented. The Child Aid projects must therefore be capable of changing their way of operation over time, and of seizing upcoming possibilities for cooperation with all forces pulling in the same direction - being it governmental initiatives, other organisations, national or local programs. At the same time the projects maintain their clear profile with the 10 lines of activities and the basic methods of the programs.
Child Aid takes its point of departure with the people in the community. They organise themselves around the school, in family groups or around the health post, and they form committees to take care of all the different areas of development on behalf of the community. As a result of the activities, the self-organising strength is being built up over time. The capacity of self-organising is an additional result to the result of the actual, practical activities, but nonetheless a very important one.
Child Aid analyses the needs of the operation area. It can be by collecting data about child mortality or farming results, counting the number of malaria cases, registering the orphans and the children in pre-school age, just to mention a few. The analyses are an ongoing process, and the focal points change from time to time.
Child Aid operates a basic start-up program in new operation areas. Here the families learn the skills and tools of how to solve some of the basic problems of childcare, health and hygiene and food security. Most important the training starts in how to organise collectively to lift the tasks. Women and men alike, grandparents and parents, youth and children take part, and in the process they learn how to stick together, how to discuss to find solutions, how to overcome differences, how to organise actions, how to mobilise resources, material as well as intellectual, and all the other skills related to people taking action on their own affairs.
With the fundamental organisational structures in place, Child Aid becomes a catalyst for a range of programs, which depend on such structures for an effective implementation. Child Aid takes part in national and provincial health programs, aiming at securing clean water, use of latrines, or immunisation of children. Food security programs are many and various. They are programs for promotion of crop diversity so that the families do not only rely on the traditional crops, programs for sustainable farming methods protecting the environment and with less expenses in the production process, programs for secure food storage, and micro financing.
Trained families in some of the Child Aid operation areas join in housing programs, where they get the necessary financing for constructing better housing - because they are organised.
There is still a long way to go before Child Aid has reached the most basic goals of the projects. During the years of existence of the Child Aid projects, the conditions for the children in the countries of operation have deteriorated in many places.
In Botswana 110 children out of 1.000 died before the age of 5 in 2002, while the figure was 58 in 1990. In Zimbabwe the figure has gone up from 80 to 123 in the same period. This decline in child health is mostly due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, directly as a result of children infected, and indirectly because of deteriorating health systems under heavy pressure.
The issue of children without parents and the issue of taking care of the young children in pre-schools are also the concern of Child Aid, and there are special programs for that.
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