• Who makes OVC public policy?

• How should OVC public policies be made?

  • Step 1: Situational Analysis
  • Step 2: Identifying possible options
  • Step 3: Setting Your OVC Policy Framework
  • Step 4: Narrowing Down your Policy Options
  • Step 5: Final Check
  • Step 6: Planning Implementation

How should OVC public policies be made?

Step 1: Situational Analysis

During the situational analysis, policy-makers will need to answer the questions outlined below. With each question, we provide some suggestions as to how you might best find the answers.

• What OVC groups exist and what are their numbers and geographic distribution? There are several approaches you could use to obtain this information.

• Gather background data from existing national and international sources (see the Background Data section of this toolkit for links to relevant sources). Chances are data obtained this way will be too general to be sufficient, but, at a minimum, it will allow you to make some reasonable estimates.

• Conduct a vulnerability assessment focusing on OVC, which is likely to include in-depth data gathering at the state or provincial level through surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews, etc. This approach, while more accurate, is likely to be very expensive and time-consuming and will not necessarily capture the hidden groups of OVC (e.g., child domestic servants). If you are doing a risk and vulnerability assessment anyway, you could include a specific assessment of OVC in the terms of reference, thus making such a study more affordable.

• Organize a stakeholder meeting bringing together key people for each of the public and private stakeholder groups identified above and get their collective knowledge on OVC groups in the country. You may find that this low-cost, quick and dirty approach gives you a lot of valuable information. See the section on Working with Partners for details on how to organize a stakeholder meeting.

• What causes children to fall into each OVC category and what are the consequences of this fall? It is critical to correctly diagnose the factors that cause children to become OVC, because only then can you develop policies to prevent OVC. A correct diagnosis will require identifying both the direct and indirect causes. Only by attacking the indirect causes will you be able to prevent a child from becoming an OVC. As noted throughout this toolkit, it is cheaper to prevent children from becoming OVC than it is to support children who are already OVC. It is also important to understand the consequences of a child becoming an OVC both to the child and to society as a whole. For example, orphans are less likely to go to school, and this undermines their future economic opportunities. At the same time, children who are out of school tend to be more exposed than other children to all sorts of other risks. This, in turn, can lead to social ills such as street crime, youth gangs, and the spread of HIV (for more about these risks see Rationale for OVC Projects). Each category of OVC may have different needs. For example, the needs of orphans living with a member of their extended family are quite different from the needs of a street child or a child laborer. For this reason, it is important to analyze each OVC group separately.

The problem tree is an excellent way to analyze the causes and consequences of each category of OVC (see Conducting a Problem Tree Analysis) and should be done in partnership with other stakeholders.