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Engaging with key stakeholders is an essential part of any transition and must be handled with tact and wisdom. Located in South Africa, the organization Beautiful Gate began its ministry to protect street children and later grew to provide residential programs for children in need. Yet, as they began to learn more about the needs of children in families, they decided to shift away from residential care and expand their services to include the families of the children they served.
As Beautiful Gate broadened and prioritized the role of families, they communicated family strengthening as a…
Beautiful Gate was established in 1994 by a Dutch missionary couple who simply desired to do what was “just, good, and right” for children. It began as a children’s home for children living on the streets in the suburb of Muizenberg in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1999, at the request of the government, a second location was opened in the neighboring township of Crossroads as a hospice for children dying of HIV/AIDS. The hospice eventually moved to a new site in the Lower Crossroads area in 2004. The larger site made possible additional community services, including a medical clinic, community…
ABSTRACT
Objective: There is an urgent need to equip community-based careworkers with the skills to address the mental health needs of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) as an essential response to shortages in human resources for mental health in Sub-Saharan Africa. We conducted a quasi-experimental feasibility trial in South Africa to adapt and evaluate an established year-long semi-structured, manualized video-feedback caregiver intervention (the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers; MISC) for community-based organizations (CBOs).
Methods…
People with disabilities have the right to live in the community, according to Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. However, more than a decade after the adoption of the CRPD by the UN and nearly global ratification, children with disabilities continue to be placed in institutions in every region of the world. Worse still, low-middle income countries that have never had systems of institutionalization have started to build them.
In 2017, the CRPD Committee adopted general comment No. 5 on Article 19 on living independently and being included in the…
Abstract
Limited evidence exists of the effectiveness of combining cash transfers and family strengthening interventions in developing country contexts. This study provides evidence from an evaluation of a bespoke family strengthening intervention for Child Support Grant beneficiaries in 10 urban communities in Johannesburg, South Africa. A qualitative pre-post design was used to assess the effectiveness of this combination intervention including a nine-month follow-up study. Participants were randomly assigned to intervention and non-intervention groups allowing for comparison between the…
In collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, this feasibility study was undertaken by a team of academic researchers from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, University of Ghana and Makerere University in Uganda, all of whom are members of the Africa Network of Care-leaving Researchers (ANCR).
Given the paucity of research on youth transitioning from alternative care (i.e. care-leaving or leaving care) in Africa, the study sought to develop and test a methodology for a cross-country, comparative study on leaving care in Africa. This involved the…
This report presents the latest findings from the Growth Beyond the Town Girls and Boys Town South Africa (GBTSA)/University of Johannesburg (UJ) joint partnership longitudinal research study. This serves as an update to a similar report that was written in 2019. The report includes data collected since the project’s inception in 2012, up until the last wave of data collection, which took place in late 2019. Presented are the findings from 150 participants who were interviewed as they disengaged from GBTSA, as well as the outcomes of many of these care-leavers that have been measured each…
The Sihleng’imizi (meaning ‘we care for families’) Family Programme is designed to complement and scale up the positive benefits of the Child Support Grant (CSG) in South Africa and strengthen disadvantaged families to improve child well-being outcomes. The main purpose of the follow-up evaluation was to assess first, whether participants in the Sihleng’imizi Family Strengthening programmes had retained what they had learned and were able to implement these learnings nine months following termination of the intervention; second, to compare these findings with the control group that had not…
Family for Every Child, as part of its How We Care initiative, has developed a series on Psychosocial support for children and families during COVID-19, which highlights different approaches taken by three of its member organizations to providing essential psychosocial support to…
COVID-19, also known as coronavirus disease 2019, emerged in China In December 2019. Over the months that followed, cases of the virus were reported in most countries around the world. The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic in early March 2020.
The pandemic is having a significant impact on Family for Every Child Members and the children and families that they work with. The virus doesn't discriminate, but the impact of the illness is unequal, with far greater socio-economic and health consequences for poor and marginalised communities.
This…