Promoting child protection

The need to protect and promote children is the shared agenda of the Swaziland government and the UN children's Fund (UNICEF) that has led to a community-based programme whose success is rooted in Swazi culture. "We call it Lihlombe Lekukhalela, which is SiSwati for 'shoulder to cry on', and refers to the community workers, who people go to for child welfare information and guidance," Alan Brody, UNICEF's Swaziland national representative, told IRIN. Currently, over a third of the country is covered by the programme, with full coverage anticipated by next year. Funding from the government and UNICEF has been enthusiastic, because the grassroots approach to identifying children in need and offering them assistance has proved effective. The concept of a shoulder to cry on implies a sympathetic listener to people's problems. While community members do indeed count on these social workers to provide psychological counselling, the programme's broader goal is to link children in need with health, education, feeding and other schemes. One study predicted that by 2010, one-sixth of the Swazi population will be comprised of orphans whose parents died of AIDS. If such children are to survive, social welfare authorities agree, programmes to target their needs must be established now. Each community chooses a resident to act as a social welfare worker/data collector. "The people know who is best suited for this role, and it gives a sense of ownership to the programme," said Jabu Dlamini, the project manager for Women in Development. "Two years ago, we conducted a survey that showed we had a crisis with forgotten children - children whose existence we didn't know about, and so we couldn't help them," said Jabu. Working with UNICEF, the concept of neighbourhood monitors evolved. "We could not impose outsiders onto the community. We needed residents who knew everyone in the area. They could go around, find which household is headed by children because the parents died of AIDS, or which household is not getting sufficient food or other attention," Brody related. Some 450 children's centres, called care points, have been opened around the country. There are 160 trained staff so far. Psychological expertise is available at the centres, in communities that never had such a service. Volunteers who await formal training in the psycho/social support of children are presently running some facilities. The World Food Programme (WFP) has also become involved and in the past few months has provided corn/soya blend to the care points. A similar collaboration between UNICEF and WFP has brought meals to primary schools in drought-ravaged parts of the country. Children who had disappeared from classrooms because they were too weak from malnourishment to walk to school and stay awake during lessons, have returned to find two guaranteed meals a day, breakfast and lunch. The community care point programme will vastly expand meal distribution to Swaziland's children. "Children who were chronically malnourished can depend on being fed at a place nearby, where people they know are there to see to their other needs," said Alice Matse, a care point worker at Nyangeni, a village 40 km north of the commercial city of Manzini. "I am a shoulder to cry on, but I also take action. The beauty of the care point programme is that the centres meet so many needs at the same time," she said. Child welfare officials want the care points to be all-encompassing centres to assess the needs of children from a particular community, and relate the data to government and UNICEF, who would in turn target resources to meet local needs. UNICEF Swaziland predicts that by next year all communities in Swaziland will be served by children's care points. "We have a funding commitment from UNICEF to expand the programme, train additional point workers and build their capacity, because success has come from the skills of the individual children’s supervisors. Their commitment has been extraordinary," said Dlamini.