UGANDA: Catholic Care for Children in Uganda fosters Scholars with Skills
Mary Lilly Driciru MSMMC
Catholic Care for Children –Uganda (CCCU) is conducting an ongoing training in Child Protection and safeguarding for its scholars to foster and reinforce their skills.
This is in response to a research that revealed that Sisters involved in child protection and safeguarding faced challenges resulting into legal implications.
“Due to challenges Sisters faced in the past, we call for guarded and formal way of handling the apostolate of child ministry without compromising individual charisms,” said Sr. Stella Maris Kamanzi OLGC, CCCU National Programme Coordinator.
According to Sr. Stella, “Best practices for child safeguarding” is a global goal for the consecrated persons involved in the ministry of child safeguarding. Informal dealings and cases of child abuse were mostly recorded due to ignorance. We are streamlining all to do with child safeguarding and we shall run parallel programs to cover up pending programs that were postponed due to COVID-19 pandemic last year.”
This maiden workshop for opening the year 2021 was conducted from 8-20 February, with 15 participants. The next one is designed for March with 23 participants more will follow after this. However, the training has been ongoing since 2017. As the training program was going on in the central office, other staff members were in the field carrying out dialogue meeting in Eastern and Northern Uganda, while others went to Child Care Institutions (CCIs) to conduct family tracing and assessments.
Topics tackled in the training among others include: Introduction to Child Protection, Legal and Policy framework, International, Regional and National child protection systems; Prevention and Response strategies in child protection.
The program also emphasizes the need to integrate basics of best practices of child protection and procedures at international, regional and national legal frameworks to avoid certain mistakes.
The same basics of best practices are to be applied while dealing with group employees.
