Mobilizing and strengthening community-led childcare through community care groups and coalitions: A study from Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia

Abstract

This article presents findings from a study, involving over 778 respondents from 24 communities in 4 countries, where WV has supported community-led childcare initiatives. The community care coalition (CCC) is a foundational feature of World Vision’s programming model for mobilizing and strengthening community-led care for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), and people chronically/terminally ill. To date, WV facilitates and supports over 3700 such community care mechanism with over 934,500 orphans and vulnerable children being supported by those groups in 20 African countries. To learn from this experience, WV conducted a study from August to November 2006 with the aim of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different types of community care groups (CCG) – directly involved in child care - and community care coalitions (CCC) –focused on coordination and networking - within different contexts in order to inform and guide World Vision (WV) and its partners' future programs to mobilize and strengthen community-led care for orphans and vulnerable children. Findings indicate, that community led-child care established through strong community mobilization processes, well horizontally and vertically networked, are sustainable mechanisms for enhanced child well being at the community level. However, the quality of care depends largely on the quality of home visitors and the frequency of ongoing home visits. Home visitors have limited capacities in areas such as HIV and AIDS information, psychosocial care, local level service access advocacy, as well as child rights and protection. There is a need to enhance investment in training and strengthening the skill sets of home visitors. Organizational capacity building is an important step towards full ownership and sustainability of CCCs. Stronger, well established CCCs should start to mentor less established CCCs in the same geographical areas. WV needs to see such community-led child care initiatives not “just” as HIV and AIDS projects but as the foundation for long-term sustained and community owned child care and support institutions. Child participation in existing CCCs is either weak or absent. This general lack of children’s participation in CCC processes provides significant challenges and opportunities for program innovation and development that have the potential to shift the balance of power in communities in favor of children. Children need to be seen by CCCs and home visitors as active participants and not just beneficiaries. It is important for CCCs to develop strong participation capacities to ensure full and meaningful child participation towards enhanced and sustained quality of life for all children in communities where CCCs exist.   Key words: Orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), community childcare, HIV and AIDS, community mobilization, program performance, participation.