Empowering Communities to Protect Children project, Uganda, 2017-2020

What it is and how it works

The Empowering Communities to Protect Children (ECPC) project, implemented by ChildFund International and the AfriChild Centre aimed to prevent all forms of violence against children (VAC), including sexual violence, and to strengthen support and response services for children in two sub-counties in Kitgum District, Uganda. ECPC promoted violence-free communities through:

• Strengthened grassroots child protection mechanisms for prevention and response.
• Access to improved child protection services.
• Increased enforcement of the child protection legal framework at the district and community level.
• Increased knowledge of violence and its harmful effects among children, families, and communities.

Components of the intervention included:

• Training local child protection actors in referral pathways and effective case management. Where they existed, this included formal child protection committees (CPCs), community development officers, village leaders, and community-level parasocial workers, which serve as a link between communities and the more formal social welfare officers. Where formal structures did not exist, well-respected cultural ‘clan’ or religious leaders participated in the project.
• Sensitization for parents and caregivers, as well as community members, on identifying VAC, the importance of reporting, and referral pathways through community dialogues and radio campaigns.
• Engaging children attending school-based protection clubs to build life skills, including knowledge of violence and reporting mechanisms.
• Providing financial resources to child protection system actors to respond.
• Dissemination of simplified and accessible versions of child protection laws to sensitize children, communities, and local government, as well as traditional, religious, and youth leaders, on applicable laws and policies.
• Facilitation of legal clinics and community outreach to support victims and survivors of violence and to build trust in the judicial system.
• Training civil society, police, attorneys, legal officers, and prison staff on their roles and responsibilities in implementing child protection legal framework [2]. 

ECPC aimed to create safer family and community environments through parental support and to develop life skills among child advocates [3].

Evaluation and program outcomes

The evaluation used a quasi-experimental design with an intervention group and a matched control group (in a different sub-county) of children (ages 10-17 years) and caregivers. The process involved structured surveys, interviews, and focus groups to collect data from 1,232 respondents at baseline and 1,230 at endline [2].

The evaluation’s quantitative findings indicate that the intervention led to the following:

In addition, qualitative findings suggested:

Challenges: 

• In communities with no functioning child protection committee, the project needed to work with respected and well-known religious or cultural groups. 
• The lack of compensation for parasocial workers challenges sustainability in the long term. 
• The lack of availability of basic resources, such as transportation to ensure proper case management, outside of project support, is a significant barrier to case follow-up
• Misunderstandings about the judicial process makes the return of suspects on bail, for example, very confusing and instills mistrust between the community and parasocial workers. 
• The lack of understanding of judicial processes reduces trust in parasocial workers. Communities suspect collusion between them and sexual violence offenders who return to the community on bail. 
• Poor record-keeping and logistical barriers hamper effective follow-up of cases.
• Local leaders have refused to support or actively blocked child protection work due to a lack of remuneration. 
• COVID-19 school closures impacted the functionality of children’s clubs and may have contributed to decreased children’s knowledge of, participation in, and perceived value of clubs from baseline to endline.
• Discord between formal child protection and village leaders’ traditional cultural approaches, whose focus is not in the best interest of the child but on reconciliation between the perpetrator and the survivor. For example, participants reported the withholding of information from police to prevent cases from escalating [1]. 

Lessons learned: 

• An initial mapping of grassroots child protection systems upon which to develop the intervention was critical.
• Placing children at the center of childhood violence prevention and response interventions offers powerful opportunities for community awareness, reporting, and referral of cases.
• The Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development should ensure that the VAC policy frameworks and plans highlight the importance of child participation in strategy, program design, and implementation.
• Focusing on building the capacity of established actors already working on child protection instead of introducing a new system enabled sustainability. Integrating community leaders (particularly clan leaders and elders) into this training was essential to ensure a favorable reception.
• Norms and practices that negatively impact children can be re-modeled through the respect that clan leaders command. Careful integration of formal and informal child protection systems enhances the effectiveness of child protection mechanisms.
• Empowering children and communities through knowledge is not enough; efforts should simultaneously improve community prevention and response to VAC [2].