Family Strengthening

SOS Children’s Villages firmly believes that the family is “the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children.”

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

In line with the preamble of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, SOS Children’s Villages firmly believes that the family is “the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children.” Therefore, family strengthening services are an integral part of an SOS Children’s Villages programme. This includes support for kinship care and support for reintegration processes to reunite children and young people with their family of origin. Setting up the service in a locally contextualized way to ensure that children’s and young people’s rights are fully realized within their family of origin.

 

In our Family Strengthening program our desired results are targeted at a child, family, and the community. The design of our FS services consists of a combination of two approaches: direct family empowerment (DFE) and community empowerment for family empowerment (CFE). Both approaches work towards the shared aim of family empowerment. While working with families we aim to achieve self-reliance of families, while working with communities we strive to achieve sustainability of communities.

 

Target Group

Children who are risk of losing parental care are the focus of this program. Children are viewed as being at risk of losing parental care of their family when basic material, emotional, health and educational needs are being neglected or there are abused because their caregivers lack the capacity or commitment to adequately care for their children

Package of Services

Through the FSP, we provide a range of services to support the families and communities assume their responsibility to protect and care for their children; as well as to encourage and support the government and other duty bearer to meet their obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the rights of children. At the same time, we empower children and their families to claim their rights from the government and other duty bearers. The basic services include:

  • Economic empowerment of families through green economy IGAs, increasing household saving culture through VSLAs
  • Access to health nutrition, WASH, and education services
  • Access to prevention of SGBV services
  • Child and youth safeguarding services
  • Parents and children skills development
  • Mental health &Psychosocial support  

Quality Standards

The Family Strengthening Programme is implemented against six quality standards and adherence is ensured:

  • Children most at risk of losing the care of their family are the target group.
  • Children have access to essential services for their healthy development.
  • Families are empowered to build their capacity to protect and care for their children.
  • Communities are empowered to respond effectively to the situation of vulnerable children and their families.
  • Partnerships are built to achieve common goals and leveraging sustainability specifically through key implementing partners (KIPs)
  • Ongoing planning, monitoring, and evaluation make the programmes relevant and effective.

 

In FSP, we tackle all three levels of prevention by following the two approaches to FS:

  • Primary prevention to reduce underlying risk factors of child-family separation in a community (CFE)
  • Secondary prevention to prevent child-family separation in individual families (DFE or CFE)
  • Tertiary prevention to support reintegration of children in alternative care with their families of origin as soon as feasible and in the best interests of the child. (DFE or CFE).

 

In many cases, children, and young people in the process of reintegration are part of the family strengthening target group as they and their families require specific support before, during and after this process.in this regard, our AC and FS services do cooperate closely in managing a smooth reintegration process.

Alternative Care

Results Based Management