Our Projects - Kenya
Kenya Street Child Rehabilitation and Reintigration Project
Thika, Kenya
Background
Action for Children in Conflict, ASK's project partner in Kenya, began a programme in 2004 to address the problem of the ever-increasing number of street children in Thika, 40km northeast of Nairobi. The majority of street children are young boys who originate from a huge slum on the edge of town.
Action for Children in Conflict addresses the needs of these children through a holistic approach aimed at their rehabilitation and long-term social reintegration. Street children are identified through outreach work and encouraged to attend a Day Care Centre and residential care centre. Various activities are also undertaken aimed at keeping children in school.
Street childrens day centre
Latest Update - Direct from Kenya, August 2011
In the last 12 months we directly assisted 3,612 street and other acutely vulnerable children, through 5 core programmes encompassing education empowerment, economic security, free legal services, direct rehabilation work and dedicated social work and counselling. We are now running 15 distinct projects to meet our ongoing aims and objectives to permanently reduce the number of street children in the wider Thika District.
Action for Children in Conflict has continued to develop our knowledge, expertise and skills in working with street and other acutely vulnerable children in the last 3 months. In February we were shortlisted for a best practice award for child protection for the whole of Africa, from over 1000 nominated organisations. In July we reached the last 10 in this competition. We had an indepth assessment of our financial accountability and transparency, service delivery, impact, networking and partnerships and our organisational structure and governance to achieve this level. We are immensely proud to have reached the last 10! It is testament to our quality work, achieved because of your important, consistent support.
The Director was also nominated by Thika District for a Government Award for services to the community. 5 people in the district were nominated and their names have been forwarded to the provincial level for further selection. We are proud that the Director and therefore AfCiC is seen as an integral and highly important part of the Thika Community.
We launched formal adult literacy classes for our older street youth participating in our Into Work programme in early July. We are committed to ensuring that those who would like to complete their primary leaving certificate and secondary leaving certificate are able. The classes are 7am-9am daily, to enable the youth to attend their practical apprenticeships from 9am. The classes are well attended and we are delighted at the progress they are making. We currently have 80 youth participating in our Into Work Programme.
We are also in the process of launching a joint initiative with the police and municipal council to create a small business cooperative for the oldest street children in Thika. These are the children for whom all attempts at rehabilitation have failed. They are now too old for residential rehabilitation, have insufficient patience for community apprenticeships due to long term behaviours learnt on the streets and cannot go home. By legitimising and making safe work they already conduct on the streets - luggage carrying - we hope to give them credible, sustained,legal work through which to support themselves and their families and push them away from petty and more serious crime. We will keep you updated!
We fully refurbished a library at Garissa Road Primary School, one of our partner schools, with the aim of increasing literacy at the slum based school. The library had remained dormant since 2 initial building work by the government two years ago was not completed. We fitted metal doors, windows, a ceiling, painted the room and donated books. Literacy rates are very low at the school.
We held our Holiday Club in August to keep children off the streets and in a safe, educational, fun environment with a free nutritious meal daily. In previous years the club has averaged an attendance of 400-500, but this year we had 750 regular attendees due to the chronic food inflation that has hit Kenya. Poverty levels in Thika are rising dramatically and so demand for our services is increasing daily. Whilst we are proud to have hosted so many children, it was an incredible strain on our budget and we are already starting to plan how we can manage such numbers in future. But, despite the challenges, we managed to provided excellent life skills education, basic literacy and numeracy, on-site counselling, a free dental service, community fire safety training from the local fire station and sports and other recreational activities which were enjoyed by all.
We are also currently coming to the end of 6 months of rehabilitation at our Interim Care Centre. We have decided, after detailed individual assessments, to release 9 of the children and retain 13 for another 3 months of rehabilitation and family therapy. The children being released have been bought school uniform, we have assisted them with school registration and are supporting their families economically where appropriate. Our parental counselling groups are continuing to proceed well since being launched in January 2011.
Finally, we recently partnered with Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) to start a successful advocacy campaign with our legal department (KCLAW) on different children's rights. Over the next few months some of our children will be heard on radio throughout central province talking about the issues that led them to the street and their situation now. Following very detailed planning sessions with the children (to ensure informed consent) the radio broadcasts went extremely well and we are looking forward to witnessing the impact.
Land Development
Since the purchase of 3 acres of land earlier this year we have been working on detailed plans for the whole site - to ensure we can become a best practice site not only for street and other acutely vulnerable children in Thika but also for other organisations to come, share and learn from our work. We have had architects in both Kenya and the UK donating plans for the site, which is excellent! but this has also made the process far slower than we anticipated. We now have draft plans but are working to get them exactly right before starting accurate calculations for all the construction work. We will obviously be building in stages.
On the agricultural front however we have made significant progress since your donation a few months ago. Working in partnership with a local NGO called Real Impact, who have expertise in making productive kitchen gardens to both improve nutrition and sustainability, we have ploughed a shamba (garden) and prepared the land for planting when the rains come shortly. We have also built a goat shed and transferred our goats from our centre a fortnight ago. They are very happy with their new site! We have also refurbished the existing rooms on the land to make them suitable for habitation and our new gardener recently moved in, alongside a security guard. Furthermore, we have been able to finally sort a good quality fence for the site with your support. We had received a previous donation to make the fence, but due to the aforementioned incredible inflation we were not able to go ahead. With your support this work is now starting in preparation for the rains.
We will be starting an extension to the rooms and some additional accommodation so that we can satisfactorily house our gardener, security and still have a temporary refuge for victims of child abuse, alongside some toilets and showers. This work is pending more quotations to ensure we are building the best quality and at the best possible price. Finally, we have planted napier grass to enable us to satisfactorily feed 2 cows. None of this would have been possible without your support.
THANK YOU!
None of this would be possible without your support. Many, many thanks.
Eleanor Harrison
Director - Action for Children in Conflict
Thika,
Kenya
September 2010 Update
Action for Children in Conflict is extremely grateful to Action for Street Kids for their ongoing support of our work with street children in Thika District, Kenya. Our high quality work succeeds because of your support. Thank you!
Below is a brief update about some of our activities over the last few months.
Margaret, helping to feed over 200 children everyday at St Patrick’s
Primary School through our
school feeding programme
We took 25 street children into our Interim Care Centre in March – providing them with food, shelter, clothing alongside intensive education, counselling and family work over a 6 month period. At the beginning of September 17 of these children were successfully returned home and to school. We bought school uniform, paid fees where necessary and helped their parents/ guardians with all the essential items and emotional support to get them into school. We have decided to keep the remaining 8 for a further 3 months as we feel that they have very critical family issues to still work through before we are satisfied that they would be both safe and happy at home. We will also be conducting both home and school visits to the 17 now in school over this period to check that they are well and to address any problems quickly and effectively. We plan to take new children for residential rehabilitation in January 2011.
In August we held our most successful Holiday Club ever. Working with our two partner primary schools, St Patrick’s and Garissa Road, we supported over 550 vulnerable children to attend a fun, educational holiday club programme with a free nutritious lunch each day. We also provided free academic tuition to children in Standard 7 & 8 in preparation for their important exams in November. Working with both international and local volunteers, our staff and local teachers, the Holiday Club played a critical role in keeping these acutely vulnerable children away from the streets, and the inevitable abuse and exploitation, ensuring the best ever school retention this September and the lowest number of children reported on the streets in a school holiday for a long time!
We have just completed a market analysis report for our Economic Empowerment work, assessing the profitability of different small businesses. The purpose of this report was to ensure that we are giving the best possible advice and guidance to older street youth and the parents/ guardians of the children we work with, when they start businesses and join Into Work. We want our clients to be as successful and profitable as possible, so that they are less reliant on our help. We shared the findings of this report with all the youth participating in Into Youth through a business training held last week. Using a non-formal, participatory approach (as many of those we work with do not have good literacy or numeracy) we were able to facilitate the youth to support one another in addressing their challenges. It was a fantastic success and we are now planning bi-monthly trainings covering the different areas the report highlighted as areas of need.
We renovated the shipping container purchased earlier this year and it is now a fantastic private space for counselling at our rehabilitation centre, providing privacy, warmth and security for both child and parental counselling. We have already expanded our counselling work to regular parental counselling groups now that we have an appropriate space.
We completed our Street Census Report for Thika and Makongeni and have been sharing it with all local stakeholders through the Street Children Steering Committee, Thika District (on which we are the elected chair). We have developed a coordinated strategy for working with street children and there is excellent cooperation and information sharing going on currently in the District, ensuring that street children can access better services and the public is more informed about the issues that create street children and how they can help effectively.
We have organised a series of trainings/ events to build best practice in working with vulnerable children throughout all children’s organisations in Thika. We recognise that we cannot reach all those in need of help ourselves and so are dedicated to working with others to ensure that as many children are reached as possible in the most effective way. In the last few months this has included 2 social worker round-tables (June and August 2010), a mediation training (June 2010), a drug and alcohol abuse training (September 2010) and a legal training on children’s inheritance when brought up by children’s homes (May 2010).
We participated in the Day of the African Child, in June 2010 supporting the District Children’s Office in organising and publicising the event. Over 1000 people attended the event at Thika Stadium and it was enjoyed by all.
A former volunteer, Chris Howarth, ran from Busia to Mombasa in July and August 2010, to promote awareness about our work and the plight of street children in Kenya. Not only did he complete the epic (and sometimes painful!) journey but he successfully managed to bring the issues to new audiences in both Kenya and overseas. He is now planning to make a documentary about the journey.
In early September we helped over 150 former street children and other acutely vulnerable children to return to school through assistance with uniform and other basic items through our School Drop Out Prevention Programme. We are hoping to run a teacher training course in early 2011 to develop better awareness and skills in teachers working with acutely vulnerable children to prevent children from ending up on the streets because of problems in school.
In July 2010 we organised Thika’s first ever Children’s Parliament, giving children from poor schools, the opportunity to share their views and opinions with other children, teachers and local government officers (education, health etc..). Working with 6 primary schools, the children selected different topics that they felt were important to them for discussion. We followed up with a bigger parliament this September with over 80 people in attendance. Our aim is to develop the advocacy skills of the most vulnerable children and then create opportunities for these children to share their problems directly with those in authority, with the aim of helping to bring about positive change.
We continue to feed 1000 acutely vulnerable children every day through our school feeding programme, keeping the most needy in school and accessing invaluable education.
Joseph, Gitau, Robert and Danson performing acrobatics at our Interim
Care Centre – we teach the children acrobatics as part of their rehabilitation programme – teaching concentration,
team work, patience, trust and strength.
None of this would be possible without your support. Many, many thanks.
Eleanor Harrison
Director - Action for Children in Conflict
Thika,
Kenya
