COMPETENCE BUILDING AGENCY
"ICDP is a competence-building NGO in the field of psycho-social and educational care of children at high risk. Our work is directed towards vulnerable children, their caregivers and families.
ICDP developed a simple programme that has been tested out in different societies all over the world from Indonesia to Latin American, from South Africa and Angola to Scandinavian countries and Western-Russia. There is evidence that the programme works in all these different societies and with caregivers from very different educational backgrounds.
The aim of the programme is to strengthen caregivers’ involvement with their children in a positive way, to give them confidence in their own capacity as carers, to facilitate those relationships that support children’s development and to prevent those relationships and conditions that may lead to neglect and abuse of children.
In this way our programme is closely linked to the work of promoting children's rights and through its emphasis on empathy and compassion for the other, it also contributes to peace building.
We are working in a community based way by training and mobilising resource persons in local networks and organisations to spread our programme further to caregivers in their communities. Through this approach we are able to reach more caregivers, families and children at risk than if we used the traditional clinical or institutional approach employed by most NGOs working in this field.
Although we actively encourage the participation of men, in practice we mostly work with groups of women and networks in which women are strongly involved. This is so because children's caregivers in most traditional societies are still women. Empowerment of women is therefore implicit in our programme.
Our aim is to provide for the psychosocial care of vulnerable children and families: children handicapped due to poverty, after-effects of war and uprooting, family-conflicts and violence, children in camps and institutions. We also include preventive health components in our programme where that is needed. Recently we have started to include information on the spreading of HIV and AIDS in our work with caregivers and we are also involved in using our programme in assessing and promoting appropriate psychosocial care for vulnerable children and orphans in the wake of the AIDS epidemics.Our work is primarily competence-building and training; this means that when the training of caregivers and institutions is over and the quality of the work is evaluated, we withdraw, after having prepared local caregivers, or trainers, to take over the organisation and further implementation of our programme.
Karsten Hundeide
In order to ensure sustainability follow-up of the work of local teams over some time is important, and, whenever possible, we also try to insert the ICDP Programme into existing institutional structures like government networks, leading NGOs working in the field of care for children and families and educational institutions like high schools and universities. In this way ICDP training may become an established part of the local institutions responsible for the care of children and for the education of future leaders and resource-persons in this field." - Professor Karsten Hundeide, chairman ICDP
