For the last 10 years, we have been supporting volunteer Child Protection Teams (CPTs) in six communities in Jinja, Uganda. This low-cost, community-owned model has transformed these areas, enabling local people to create protective environments that allow children to thrive.
In 2022, introduced the Child Protection Team model in a new area - Karamoja, eight hours north of Jinja, where poverty is rife, and children are at risk. New Child Protection Teams will tackle child rights abuses and ensure vulnerable children are better protected.
Since 2016, Children on the Edge has worked in Masese III, a marginalised community near Jinja, Uganda. Here, we established one of our first Child Protection Teams (CPTs), made up of local volunteers dedicated to upholding children’s rights and addressing child abuse and neglect. Their work has been transformational for the local community.
Masese III is home to the Karamojong, a nomadic group from the Karamoja district in northeastern Uganda. Endemic poverty forces many to leave their home region, and when we first began working in Masese III, child protection awareness was minimal. Children often roamed unsupervised due to deeply ingrained cultural norms.
Because of their nomadic wandering lifestyle, when we first started working in Masese III, the Karamojong people living here had little understanding of child protection and tended to let their children roam around the neighbourhood with no adult supervision.
Babra Nandawula, Social Worker at Children on the Edge Africa told us:
“We have observed their lifestyles and learnt a lot about their culture, as they do most things based on their ways from back home. We have noticed that they do not focus so much on the needs of their children. If a child of two years can feed him or herself, then they are often left to fend for themselves.”
The Child Protection Team in Masese III has recruited and trained Karamojong members, connected with Karamojong leaders, and created incredible transformation over the years with regard to child protection in the community. However, as the influx of arrivals from Karamoja continues, so do the prevailing habits of child abuse and neglect.
In response, we decided to take action at the source. Inspired by the success in Masese III, Nsenge Edrine, a Karamojong member of the Child Protection Team in Masese, returned to his village to replicate the model. He stayed in touch with Babra, our social worker in Uganda, for advice and support. .
As more information emerged from Edrine, we decided in 2022 to join him to research the challenges facing people in the area to see how we could provide more support.
We focused our work in one of nine districts, Napak, which was identified as one of the areas most at risk. The team from Children on the Edge Africa initially spent time talking with local communities and their leaders, along with NGOs, child protection workers and officials in the area.
We found widespread hunger and poverty in Karamoja, with land and soil infertile and food scarce. Children face neglect, sexual abuse, trafficking, and early marriages, while crime is rampant, and law enforcement is severely under-resourced. Children older than babies or toddlers are not cared for, but left to wander outside, and few are sent to school. There is a high rate of sexual abuse and assault, and arranged marriages are agreed for girls as young as two years old, who are then married by 13. Most perpetrators can rape with impunity, especially in the case of ‘courtship’ rape, where a man or boy will rape a girl they like the look of, who will then be forced to marry them.
Many people leave the area to beg, or eat scraps from bins, and children run away from home because they are hungry. Many children are trafficked to Somalia for organ harvesting or Nairobi for sexual exploitation and begging, then discarded back in their villages. Others are taken to towns like Jinja, Mbale, Busia and Kampala where criminal exploitation is rife.
Outdoors, groups of armed cattle rustlers will not hesitate to kill people that come across their paths, viewing them as bad omens. In general, movement outside the hours of 8.00am - 4.00pm is deemed to be too dangerous.
But through collaboration with local leaders, NGOs, and community members, we set up five new CPTs in 2022 across Napak’s parishes. This work started with relationship-building, training, and sensitising communities about the value of children and their rights. Whilst many of the NGOs registered in the region have ceased operations and services are scarce, we wanted to complement, strengthen, and work within existing local child protection structures in the district. Local officials and leaders expressed appreciation for our approach, noting it was the first time they felt truly involved from the start of a project.
*Sensitising involves providing training and encouraging a change of mindsets through relationship building and ongoing discussion and conversations.
In August 2022, we held community workshops across 32 villages in Lokopo sub-county, led by Edrine and newly trained ‘Resource Persons’. Over 1,600 people attended, eagerly learning about the Child Protection Team model. Through these meetings, 50 people were elected to form the five new Child Protection Teams, setting the stage for continued progress in protecting the children of Karamoja.
These teams are supported to create protective environments for the children living in their communities and will be able to tackle abuse and neglect to help keep children safe.
Our Child Protection Team (CPT) model has proven that community owned work brings transformation and creates protective environments for the most vulnerable children.
