|
COMPETENCE
BUILDING AGENCY previous
continue (page
2 of 6)
Professor Karsten Hundeide,
ICDP chairman
"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.
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
previous
continue (page
2 of 6)
|
