• 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

Step 2: Identifying possible options

At this stage, you want to be as inclusive as possible in identifying interventions that could serve to prevent and assist OVC. Later, you will have to narrow down your options to a package that responds to real needs and is realistic in light of your resource and capacity constraints. The risk of not being inclusive at this stage is that you may miss opportunities to serve cost-effectively a wider range of vulnerable children.

The directions below should help you identify an inclusive package of possible interventions:

• Eliminate any causes or consequences on your problem tree that are not within the power of the policy-makers to address. These might be natural or man-made disasters that cause large numbers of OVC (e.g., floods, wars), or globalization that causes a high demand for goods in an industry that traditionally uses child labor, or even interventions that are not feasible within the scope of your mandate (e.g., an entire overhaul of the health care system).

• With the remaining causes and consequences, identify interventions that might help prevent the cause from emerging or minimize the negative impact of a consequence on children and society.

• For each intervention identified above, you will need to determine whether policies and programs already exist to address this need. If so, are these programs at the required scale? Are they well adapted to the specific needs of your intended OVC beneficiaries? Are they actually reaching OVC? Are they run effectively? What modifications may be required to adequately address the OVC needs? In the process, you may identify a number of piecemeal activities already underway that have proven ineffective because they are not implemented in a coherent fashion, or that they are highly wasteful. You may decide that these initiatives should be replaced by a more strategic, integrated package of interventions. Note that you may need to carry out a specific study to have the information you would need for this step.

• You will also need to identify interventions that do not exist or gaps in service. Among the gaps, you should identify those that can be realistically addressed by government given its economic and institutional capacity and those that are just not practical to address at this stage of the country’s development. Keeping in mind that in many situations it may be wiser to expand/modify something already working than creating something new.

At the end of the exercise, you should be able to fill out the following table for each of the OVC groups identified.

For an example of what this table might look like once filled in, click here. This table is purely illustrative. If you are having trouble identifying possible interventions for the second column of the table above, take a look at these examples of OVC Interventions to get some ideas.