OVC Category |
Intervention types during conflict (coping and prevention)
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Intervention types post conflict (coping and rehabilitation)
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All OVC
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on OVC) |
- Encourage efforts to keep schools running during conflict
- Design tailored interventions to keep (vulnerable) children in school in order to reduce vulnerability (targeted school feeding programs, abolish fees, waivers, conditional transfers – see education section)
- Target households with OVC to receive livelihood enhancing benefits, such as small livestock
- Establish temporary crisis shelters to protect unaccompanied children from recruitment and other abuse/exploitation/injury, while developing more permanent household arrangements for them.
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- Establish targeted conditional transfer arrangements to enable households to take in OVC
- Give priority to restoring the school system
- Provide incentives for enrollment of OVC (transitional catch-up classes, school feeding programs, abolish fees, waivers, conditional transfers – see education section)
- Develop reintegration programs for the most critically traumatized (see part three of this section)
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- Consult with groups of children including OVC in participatory needs assessment process of post-conflict reconstruction projects.
- Set up psycho-social services to help children deal with conflict-related trauma, school-based or community-based.
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| Project Design Features by OVC Category |
Street Children
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on street children) |
- Shelter and protect street children at risk for recruitment into armed groups, prostitution or who are exposed to violence, abuse and exploitation
- Introduce efforts to enroll street children in school to reduce exposure
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- Assist street children, who were at one time associated with armed groups, to obtain formal demobilization papers and access benefits due to them through the DDR* process.
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- Provide family tracing services to help (in particular newly recruited) street children to return to their (extended) families as quickly as possible
- Provide psychosocial services and trauma canceling.
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Orphans
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on orphans) |
- Support and stimulate community driven efforts for early identification and inclusion of newly orphaned (or socially orphaned) children
- Target orphaned children with special support in any refugee project, or projects for returnees.
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- Intensify family reunification efforts
- When impossible, establish groups homes in the community (for an example, see the Eritrea war orphan project)
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- Provide family tracing services to help children find a member of the extended family willing to take them in
- If not possible, try to identify foster families, ideally, in their own community, and stimulate these with various transfer arrangements
- Target orphans in any conditional transfer or waiver scheme to make sure they are enrolled/stay in school and, if they are pre- schoolers, they receive proper medical care.
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HIV/AIDS affected children
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on children affected by HIV/AIDS) |
- Establish preventive efforts to reduce child prostitution (and of mothers of young children) during conflict
- Support awareness campaigns about how HIV/AIDS spreads targeting OVC and mothers in particular
- Establish protective arrangement for children at special risk for prostitution and sexual abuse/violence by soldiers (orphans, social orphans, street children, refugee children)
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- Target children in HIV/AIDS affected households in any conditional transfer/waiver scheme to make sure they are enrolled in school and, if they are pre-schoolers, they receive proper medical care.
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- Provide school-based or community based psychosocial counseling services for children who have been sexually abused by members of an armed group or other war profiteers during conflict
- Support campaigns to de-stigmatize children infected with HIV/AIDS and children who have been sexually abused in general.
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Children in the worst forms of child labor
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on children in the worst forms of child labor) |
- To the extent possible, keep the school system running and the most vulnerable children in school
- Introduce efforts to protect the most exposed of OVC (like unaccompanied children) from recruitment into the worst forms of child labor as prostitution, soldiering, trafficking, and smuggling
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- Promote a campaign aimed at both children and their parents to encourage return to school rather than work, targeting especially lucrative illegal activities (drug trafficking, prostitution).
- Invest in rebuilding schools and training teachers so that the educational system is ready to absorb children who want to return to school.
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- Promote family tracing so that children can become reunited with their families and be less at risk of engaging in the worst forms of child labor.
- Provide family and community mediation and counseling services for children who are/were involved in the worst forms of child labor like prostitution, soldiering, trafficking, and smuggling.
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Child Soldiers and other children associated with armed groups
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on children associated with armed groups) |
- Set up child protection networks
- Prevent family separation and reunify separated children with their families
- Provide economic alternatives to joining fighting forces
- Provide children with educational alternatives
- Provide children with birth certificates and ID
- Advocate with government or other relevant authorities to improve child protection
- Target conditional transfers to households with OVC so that they send their children to school.
(For more detail on these preventive efforts see part three of this section) |
- Make sure that any DDR* programs have special components to address the needs of children
- Provide brokering services to children who have committed atrocities
- Encourage school-aged child soldiers to return to school as soon as possible. Offer educational catch-up programs to help them make the transition back to school.
- Assist older returning child soldiers to gain the skills and start-up capital required to become self-employed
- Offer informal educational alternatives for older child soldiers to ensure literacy and numeracy, and consider involving them in public works as an aid to help transition back into society (See example from the road sector in Sierra Leone)
(For more detail on demobilization and reintegration efforts see part three of this section) |
- Provide family-tracing services to assist children associated with armed groups to become reunited with their families as soon as possible.
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Children living with a disability
(Click here for a brief overview of the effects of conflict on children living with a disability) |
- Support efforts to prevent that children with disabilities are left behind when families evacuate conflict zones
- Targeting of children with disabilities in transfer/waiver programs to prevent them from being exclude from health services and education as family resources get scarce
- Protect children with disability from sexual abuse and prostitution
- Protect children from accessing risk areas (mines, frequent combat and violence areas)
- To the extent possible, maintain health, nutrition an immunization programs to prevent outbreaks of disabling illnesses as trachoma, Vitamin A deficiency and polio.
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- All reconstructed community infrastructure should use accessible designs.
- Finance low-cost solutions to lower physical barriers to schools (e.g., avoid steps)
- Support campaigns to de-stigmatize people/children with disabilities
- Train teachers to be supportive of disabled children in their classroom
- Finance peer-support programs where “successful” children with disabilities inform communities and coach children with new disabilities
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- Promote mine awareness campaigns targeting children to prevent accidents
- Encourage disabled children to return to school
- Support the development of regional or national centers that specialize in manufacturing and fitting artificial limbs for children and training them how to use them. Given that children grow, these centers would need offer regular check ups to each child, refitting larger limbs as the child grows. This would require the continual manufacture of new limbs and, if feasible, the creation of a revolving store of prostheses.
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