Data to Action Efforts to Address Child Protection in Africa

USAID’s HEARD Project is pleased to support four new local organizations to advance government-led action plans to address violence against children. LVCT Health and World Vision Kenya in Kenya and Project Hope Namibia (PHN) and LifeLine/ChildLine (LLCL) in Namibia work with XX stakeholders to develop and implement action plans based on the data from the Violence Against Children and Youth Surveys (VACS) (https://iscollab.org/child-protection/). Kenya, for example, is one of just two countries (the other is Zimbabwe) to have carried out a second VACS.

In Kenya, the objectives are to create visibility and public awareness of the VACS and its findings, generate county discussion on implementing the National Prevention and Response Plan on Violence Against Children (NPRP), and allocate resources to the most appropriate interventions. To this end, LVCT Health is carrying out a retrospective qualitative analysis to explore what policy and program efforts stakeholders in Kenya consider most likely to have contributed to the reduction in violence measured in the second VACS. This analysis is being funded by Wellspring Philanthropic fund and USAID/HEARD. Complementing LVCT Health’s efforts, World Vision Kenya will be directly supporting national and county-level government agencies in developing NPRP work plans and buy-in.

In Namibia, LLCL’s goal is to consolidate a National Parenting Program in collaboration with line ministries and other stakeholders. Specifically, PHN will be focused on responding to and preventing violence in school settings by designing interventions and an implementation plan to improve capacity. While the kick-off meeting for these partners’ projects is still in the planning stages, USAID and HEARD representatives participated in a hybrid (part virtual and part in-person) kick-off event on June 3 with the new Kenyan partners. The East, Central, and Southern Africa Health Community (ECSA-HC), as a sub-regional anchor of the HEARD Partnership, provided guidance on regional knowledge sharing.