EXAMPLES OF OVC INTERVENTIONS
This table provides an illustrative list of the types of interventions that might be developed to prevent children from becoming OVC and to assist those OVC who already exist. For more examples, refer to the sector-specific sections.
Orphans
Preventing Children from becoming Orphans:
- Ensure that all parents have access to and take advantage of annual preventive screenings to detect health problems before they become life threatening.
- Ensure that all parents have access to curative health care services that can address the most common causes of adult mortality – malaria, heart attacks, cholera, HIV/AID
- Provide health education to adults to help them live healthier lives.
- Promote inclusive political, social, and economic policies that minimize internal conflicts and foreign policies that minimize conflicts with neighbors.
Assisting Orphans:
- Establish and enforce laws regarding widows’ and children’s inheritance rights.
- Establish and operationalize laws facilitating the fostering and adoption of children.
- Offer a modest package of incentives to foster-families that serves to partially off-set the incremental cost of fostering a child. Incentives may be in the form of conditional cash transfers to ensure household children are enrolled in school.
Children affected by HIV/AIDS
Preventing more Children from becoming Affected by HIV/AIDS:
- Develop aggressive communication and information campaign on HIV/AIDS prevention targeting most at-risk sexually-active populations, particularly those who are parents.
Assisting Children Affected by HIV/AIDS:
- All of the above for orphans.
- In areas with high HIV/AIDS infection rates, stimulate the development of community-operated home-visitor programs that assist children with infected parents to care for their sick parents and help these families prepare the way for a more secure orphanhood: wills, memory boxes, plan for child rearing after parents’ death.
- Provide anti-retroviral treatment to all HIV positive parents to prolong their life as long as possible.
- Promote measures to prevent mother to child transmission for pregnant and lactating HIV positive mothers.
Street Children
Preventing more children from becoming Street Children:
- Promote policies that encourage monogamy and discourage divorce.
- Promote family planning to minimize the number of unwanted pregnancies.
- Establish and enforce laws that prosecute parents who abuse or abandon their children.
- Establish Child Welfare Department capable of intervening in response suspected cases of child abuse or abandonment.
- Train teachers to identify students who at-risk of leaving home due to a divorce, death, remarriage, abuse or abandonment.
Assisting Street Children:
- Discourage long-term residential programs for street children.
- Support temporary transitional programs that add value to children, while with the program – e.g., train older children in a marketable skill so they can contribute to household income when they return home.
- Promote policies that rapidly reunite children with parents or a member of extended family.
- Provide educational catch-up programs to assist street children to reintegrate into mainstream school.
Children in hazardous labor
Preventing Children from entering into hazardous forms of labor:
- Establish laws that make it illegal to hire children to perform hazardous labor.
- Establish procedures for enforcing laws against hazardous forms of child labor.
- Strive for 100% enrollment rates in primary school (e.g., by making school accessible and affordable to poor families, educating parents on the importance of education, adapting school calendar to agricultural calendar, etc.).
- Ensure that 80% of secondary school aged children are enrolled in school, especially in areas adjacent to quarries, mines, plantations, etc.
- Offer vocational training and apprenticeship programs to youth completing secondary school.
- Stimulate economic development in rural areas of the country to lower pressure on rural families to send children to perform hazardous labor
Assisting Children engaged in hazardous forms of labor:
- Reintegrate children found to be working in hazardous forms of labor into their family by providing a reintegration package to family that facilitates child’s re-enrollment in school or involvement in a safer form of economic activity close to home.
- Develop educational catch-up programs that help children who have been out-of-school for several years to transition back into the mainstream school.
Children affected by conflict
Preventing Children from being affected by conflict:
- Ensure 100% of primary school aged children are enrolled in school
- Ensure that 80% of secondary school aged children are enrolled in school, especially in areas adjacent to conflict zones.
- Offer vocational training and apprenticeship programs to youth completing secondary school.
- Establish 18 as the legal minimum age for recruitment into the government’s armed forces and actively discourage recruitment of minors with armed groups as well as children/youth.
- Ensure adequate protection of camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees so that children cannot be kidnapped and taken into the armed forces.
Assisting Children affected by conflict:
- Separate children from adults during the demobilization process and provide special services to minors.
- Reunite children with their families as soon as possible.
- Design a reintegration package for former child soldiers that benefits the entire family and is part of a larger community rehabilitation program serving the entire community.
- Develop educational catch-up programs that help children affected by conflict to reintegrate into the mainstream school system.
- For older children unable to reintegrate into school system, prepare child for viable economic opportunity in community of origin.
Children living with a disability
Preventing Children from becoming disabled:
- Make prenatal care readily available to all pregnant women
- Immunize all children against polio
- Provide all young children with vitamin A supplements to prevent blindness
- Require drivers’ education for all licensed drivers.
- Establish a building code that requires all houses in urban areas to be built from non-flammable materials.
Assisting Children with Disabilities:
- Make all public institutions – schools, health clinics, etc. accessible to disabled children
- Ensure that each Provincial Health Care Network has the capability to supply physical therapy and prosthetics to handicapped children as well as training for their parents in at-home therapy.
- Develop legislation that requires schools to integrate disabled children into the classroom, as long as they have the intellectual capacity to do the work.
- Provide training in teacher education programs to ensure that all graduating teachers have a basic understanding of techniques for integrating disabled children into their classrooms.
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