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The Child Rescue Centre (CRC) in Sierra Leone began as a faith-based residential children’s home established in 2000 with 40 children rescued from the streets during the last two years of a brutal 10-year civil war.
It was founded through a partnership between a United Methodist Church (UMC) congregation in the US and the UMC Sierra Leone Annual Conference. Within a year, the center added a family preservation program designed to provide material and financial support to at-risk families and remove the need for families to send their children to the orphanage. Over the years, the…
Abstract
The Child Rescue Centre became the first orphanage in Sierra Leone to fully transition from residential to family-based care. The decision to transition was made for many reasons, but the most unique reason is found in the story of Child Rescue Centre Director, Mohamed Nabieu. Nabieu was brought to the orphanage in 2000 and spent the majority of his childhood in the facility before returning as its Director. Following a 2016 directive from the Sierra Leonean government working with UNICEF for all orphanages to develop plans for deinstitutionalization, Nabieu and Dr. Laura…
ABSTRACT
Using inter-agency action research in Sierra Leone, this chapter provides a case study on how a highly collaborative approach can enable child protection research to achieve a significant national impact. The chapter describes how the inter-agency research facilitated a communitydriven approach to addressing teenage pregnancy. The promising results obtained before the Ebola crisis helped shape a new Child and Family Welfare Policy that featured the role of families and communities rather than formal structures. Then it examines how the social process of the research enabled it to…