Keeping Children Safe (KCS) is proud to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), perhaps the largest funder of programs for vulnerable children in the world.
Since 2011, KCS has been PEPFAR’s partner of choice in building the child safeguarding capacity of hundreds of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti.
In that first year, KCS trained over 175 participants in Nigeria, Swaziland, Ethiopia, South Africa and Lesotho. Evaluations from all five countries showed high satisfaction with the training, and KCS received requests for training from additional countries.
Since then, KCS has strengthened the child safeguarding capacity of hundreds of local PEPFAR-funded NGOs in almost every Sub-Saharan country. KCS is looking forward to building on its past success with PEPFAR so that vulnerable African children will be better protected from harm and exploitation.
Building on our success
We are pleased to announce that USAID/PACT commissioned KCS to extend the ACHIEVE project, to carry in delivering training and technical support to develop, and finalize child safeguarding policies and procedures for USAID implementing partners in up to 10 countries.
The U.S. Government’s Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC) is investing $100 million to address key gaps toward achieving HIV epidemic control and ensuring justice for children, including by leveraging the capacities and compassion of faith-based organisations and communities. One priority of the Faith and Community Initiative (FCI) is to involve the faith-based, community, and traditional leaders and structures in ensuring justice for children.
The FCI Justice for Children priority has the following goals:
- Prevent perpetration of sexual violence against children
- Protect children served by PEPFAR against sexual violence while taking part in PEPFAR programs (child safeguarding policies)
- Facilitate disclosure, reporting, and appropriate system responses to cases of sexual violence against children, with a focus on holding perpetrators accountable
The ACHIEVE project has been engaged by USAID to support the achievement of these Justice for Children goals by working with KCS to help ensure that the organisations involved in the FCI initiative have organisational child safeguarding policies and practices in place to reduce the risk of child abuse, exploitation, and neglect that can result from personnel working with children, or from the design and implementation of projects that fail to protect children.