On 24th
of April a ceremony took place at the Convention Centre José Eustaquio Rivera, in the town of
Neiva, the capital of the province of Huila. It was organized by the
local government to mark the end of
the first phase of the ICDP project that reached around 14 000
families. The ceremony was attended by representatives from the
ministries for Education, Health and Social Services, representatives
from Ecopetrol and UNICEF (the two main sponsors), members of ICDP and the
150 Facilitators who came to receive their ICDP diplomas. The 1500
trained Promoters received official recognition for their work
implementing ICDP with families although they did not attend the event. The governor of the province opened
the event. After a brief video presentation of the project,
Facilitators told of their experiences using the ICDP methodology in
different areas of the province and this was followed by short performances demonstrating the essence of ICDP through cultural expressions such as dance, music, poetry, role
play etc.
NEWS FROM
STAVANGER, NORWAY
Marianne Fjetland
writes:
Stavanger is
located on the south-west coast of Norway and it is the fourth largest
city in the country with about 117,000 inhabitants.
In the spring
2004, Stavanger was invited to participate in a pilot project where
ICDP- training was given to parents from different ethnic backgrounds.
The project was so successful that the Stavanger community decided to
continue implementing the ICDP program also in the future. For this
purpose the Stavanger community employed two persons, one on part time
and one on full time basis with the tasks of training facilitators,
implementing ICDP as part of activities established in the community
and running the every day administration.
The Stavanger
community supports ICDP facilitators financially when they start an
ICDP course with parents. So far the bulk of ICDP training took place
in connection with facilitators working directly with parents, in
their self training projects. We are now going a step further and
establishing trainers who can form new teams of facilitators.
The Public
health care authorities decided that all 65 public health nurses must
receive ICDP facilitator level training, to be used as a method in
their daily meeting with families or as a parental training method.
The Stavanger
community requested kindergarten personnel to receive ICDP training
and it is now being used as a method for working with children, as
well as being taught in kindergarten teacher-training colleges.
Johannes
education centre with bilingual education has started a pilot project
offering refugees and immigrants ICDP training as a subject included
in the introduction program to the Norwegian society, which all
refugees and immigrants in Norway have to participate in. This spring
a group of parents from Chechnya will start to receive ICDP.
We have also
started establishing district ICDP networks comprised of
multidisciplinary professional groups.
Until now the
main focus has been on training ICDP facilitators. There are 83
facilitators with competence to implement ICDP with Norwegian parents
and 28 are competent to work with parents of other ethnic backgrounds
than Norwegian, such as Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian, , Chechen, Tai,
Urdu/ Pakistani, Kosovo Albanian, as well as persons from Tigrinya
/Eritrea.
All facilitators
belong to the ICDP network that meets twice a year.
Most
facilitators and parents involved in ICDP have been very enthusiastic
and satisfied with the programme. They found that by using ICDP they
became more aware of the importance of the topics raised by ICDP. This
positive feedback is giving us a good feeling about the work we are
doing and we are very happy to have been given the opportunity to be
part of the work ICDP is doing.
NEWS FROM SERBIA
Mari Braein,
from the Unicef office in Belgrade, contacted ICDP to start
discussions on how best to bring ICDP to Serbia. Together with her
colleagues, Mari has been preparing the UNICEF early childhood package
of materials to be used in the future training of parents, and this
package includes the ICDP guidelines. The idea is to later on select a
local team of national experts to be trained as ICDP facilitators.
