Uganda: Community-based Child Protection Mechanisms and their Linkage with the National Child Protection System of Uganda—a Two-day Working Retreat

Background

The Child Protection in Crisis Network in Uganda is promoting new interdisciplinary approaches to addressing child and youth security and wellbeing concerns across a range of crisis contexts. Drawing expertise in humanitarian emergencies, HIV/AIDS, and abject poverty contexts, the CPC Network seeks to establish leadership in developing integrative analyses of critical and complex child and youth security challenges and formulating and evaluating innovative strategies to address them.
 
The CPC Network is facilitating an inaugural 2012 learning forum to focus on Community Based Child Protection Mechanisms and their linkages with the National Child Protection Systems of Uganda. The two-day working retreat will provide a reflective space where participants are encouraged to critically examine the viability of informal and formal child protection systems in Uganda and to use these experiences to frame new child protection systems development initiatives. Workshop results will provide a basis for the refinement of the CPC Network’s three year plan (2012-2015) on child protection systems strengthening and action research.                            
 
Overall Workshop Goal

The workshop goal is to promote strong child protection systems at community, district and national levels.  The role of research, human resource development, national systems strengthening and community action programs will be examined within a child protection systems development framework. We intend to turn thought into action.     
 
Specific Workshop Objectives
  1. To identify what we know—and what we need to learn—about community-based child protection mechanisms and how these mechanisms can be strengthened over time.  
  2. To examine what evidence is available regarding the viability of the national child protection system—and how its formal systems may be strengthened. 
  3. To prioritize knowledge gaps and human resource development needs as part of child protection systems development over time. 
  4. To develop a plan of action for undertaking a national capacity development and program learning initiative that will lead to improved child and youth security and wellbeing in Uganda.
Participants and Process
 
The Learning Event will bring together 30 leaders from government, civil society, international agencies and academia.  Formal or agency specific presentations will be suspended in favor of open and robust discussions. Lead national researchers will make 20 minute presentations of the evidence related to the four above objectives which will be followed by sustained discussions and debates per each objective. Participants are asked to focus on national systems development priorities more so than individual agency agendas. 
 
The agenda will include discussions on key systems-related research including current mapping research on Community Based Child Protection Mechanisms. The workshop will also delve into means of strengthening data surveillance.
 
Findings from this research will be linked with research on national systems to protection children and plans on how the systems can be linked and strengthened.
 
The workshop will also focus on Human Resource Development. The government of Uganda has approved a national curriculum program on child protection and supports the establishment of the Center for the Study of the Africa Child—framed within a human resource development framework—as part of national capacity development.
 
Data on the prevalence and root causes of childhood violence is a key element of a robust child protection system. We invite you to watch this short video in which senior Ugandan government officials from a range of ministries describe the need for national data on child abuse.
 
For more information about the workshop, please contact the PLG Coordinator Timothy Opobo topobo@uganda.childfund.org.

pdf: http://www.cpcnetwork.org/

Organisation: 
Child Protection in Crisis Network
Child Protection in Crisis Network
Child Protection in Crisis Network
Child Protection in Crisis Network
Link : 
http://www.cpcnetwork.org/

Countries

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