“All Children are Our Children”

Programs to Support Orphans and Vulnerable Children

Pact Tanzania has the unique opportunity of implementing programs that provide support to orphans and Most vulnerable children funded by two different donors. The Jali Watoto (Care for Children program) is supported by the American people through USAID and the Presidents Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Our second program is the Global Fund OVC program, which is funded out of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) Round 4 HIV and Aids program. While the programs are supported by the different donors, both programs aim to support the Tanzania National Costed Plan of Action (NCPA) for Most Vulnerable Children. The NCPA calls for citizens to organize themselves at the local level to form MVC Committees (MVCC). These committees, trained by the Department of Social Welfare, work in collaboration with civil society organizations (CSOs) to identify the most vulnerable children in their communities and provide them with needed services.

The HIV /AIDS pandemic have increased significantly the number of orphans in Tanzania. Current estimates are 2,400,000 orphans in Tanzania and an estimated 10-12% of Tanzanian children are considered vulnerable with poor or minimal access to care, protection, education, health care, nutrition and shelter. The majority face death or long-term sickness of parents and guardians, distress, bereavement and abandonment, hunger and poor nutrition, vulnerability to HIV / AIDS, poverty, rights violations and exclusion from education.

The increasing numbers of most vulnerable in the country (it is estimated that Tanzania will have 4,000,000 orphans by 2010) due to a variety of factors such as poverty and HIV/AIDS pose a great challenge to the programs and the country. Today’s vulnerable children are potentially tomorrow’s adults with HIV and the number of MVC increasing rapidly in the years to come. Strategies need to be developed at the district and community levels to address this new challenge. With the combined efforts of the public sector, civil society and organized citizen groups, the challenge of helping and reducing the number of vulnerable children of Tanzania can be achieved.

Pact’s aim is to “make a real difference for children, without making children different!” This is the basis of our approach to improving the quality of the services we provide, or in other words, ensuring that the services and support that we provide for Most Vulnerable Children are as effective as they can be and that they make a real impact for the individual child, his/her family and the community in general.

We talk of not making children different because we are conscious of the fact that if we make children stand out and appear different from other children because they have new school bags or new shoes, neither of which other families in the community can afford, then in fact we cause problems for children and may even subject them to a greater degree of stigma and discrimination than might otherwise be the case. When children and their families are seen to be receiving more than is the norm for that community, this can lead to resentment, to the community withdrawing any support they were offering themselves and to a number of other “unintended consequences”, none of which are good for children.

We recognize that PEPFAR and the GFATM provide the opportunity for vulnerable children in Africa to be offered support for the first time in their lives in many instances and for the first time in development history, substantial resources have been made available to enable children made vulnerable by HIV /AIDS, by poverty, by disability and by abuse and exploitation. While the timeframe for this funding remains uncertain in the context of a changing political and economic global climate, this puts the responsibility on us all to make sure that the support that we provide in this point in time to the most vulnerable children in our midst is going to make the most significant change in their lives.

How do we do this? We collaborate with the Tanzanian Department of Social Welfare (DSW) and under Jali Watoto, provided grants to the district councils with whom we work to enable them to identify the most vulnerable children in their communities. National facilitators from the DSW and local authority staff work together to train local communities to determine the factors that make children vulnerable and using these factors, children are then identified as most vulnerable. During this process, the MVC Committees are established, one in every village, to mobilize community resources in support of those children and their families. All villages and wards in all of our districts now have MVCCs, and Pact has been able to work on building their capacity through involving them in the training received by the village volunteers in the program.

We also work with our partner organizations and fund them to identify the particular problems faced by children who have been identified as most vulnerable. We believe that as with any good doctor, we need to get the “diagnosis right” in order for the treatment to be effective. What this means in terms of working with families who are vulnerable is that we need to treat every family as far as possible, as different to the next one and make sure that we do identify all the factors that prove to be a challenge in their lives. This way, like any good doctor, we see each patient as an individual with an individual medical history and individual symptoms. We aim to get the “diagnosis right” and then to provide the “treatment” or in reality, the support that will enable the family to best deal with the particular problems that they face.

How do we do that? First of all, we have worked with our partner organizations to make sure they have sufficient numbers of volunteers, at least one per village, to carry out a detailed needs assessment. We have trained all the village volunteers to use this tool and also to use the guidelines that we have developed for the volunteers, to enable them to understand their jobs and to strive to do it in the best possible way for children and their families.

This year, we have made a significant change in the way we do things by introducing these guidelines. These guidelines act as job aids for volunteers, giving them guidance on how to support children and their families under the seven service areas detailed in PEPFAR guidance on orphans and vulnerable children. They highlight the best way to provide support, what can be done by the community, why a particular service is important and what happens if we don’t provide a quality or effective service in that area. The 7 service areas are; psycho-social support which basically means emotional and psychological support which we provide through regular home visits to the family. In addition, there are five other service areas directed at the children (food and nutrition, education, health care, shelter and care and legal and social protection) and one with a focus on the family, economic strengthening. PEPFAR illustrates this as 6 + 1 services while Pact over time, is working towards economic strengthening becoming a more prominent service, and illustrating this as 1 + 6.

This increased focus on economic strengthening is illustrated by the fact that over this past year, we have been working hard to incorporate Pact’s WORTH program into our programs for vulnerable children. We are working to combine the savings and credit element of WORTH with the introduction of discussion topics for the groups, the membership of which will be entirely drawn from the carers of the most vulnerable children. These discussion topics, around 12 in total covering child development, HIV prevention, First Aid, children and their nutritional needs, child rights and so on, will support the carers in being better able to care for and protect their children.

Under the two programs, Pact and our partners have provided one or more services to more than 250,000 children; supported and trained more than 3,000 volunteers; liaised with more than 4100 MVCCs (with approximately 10 members each); provided subgrants and built the capacity of 68 partners and now operates in 46 districts on mainland Tanzania.

Just as with the anti-stigma campaign, the message is the same, the most vulnerable children in our midst belong to all of us and need to be cared for and supported by all of us in our communities. As our Anti-stigma champion, the First Lady of Tanzania says, these are Tanzanian children, they do not belong to anyone but ourselves. Watoto wote ni Wetu, All Children are Our Children. Pact will build on this message again and again in the coming year.