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Elizabeth Njeri (right) and her grandmother (left) at the Mathare Early Childhood Development Center on May 18,2012. Elizabeth who was orphaned at childbirth is among the few lucky orphans who benefited from the former Mathare Day Care Center now Mathare Early Childhood Development Center |
It is an open secret that HIV and AIDS is one of the lead causes of the increase in the number of Orphaned and Vulnerable Children. In Kenya much has been done to fund existing child care centers and homes offering OVC services, but a gaping disconnect is still felt in low resource segments like slums dealing with the OVC problem. Most of the OVCs living in the slums find safe haven in these facilities which are met with a host of challenges -- from lack of space and facility to untrained personnel responsible for day to day operations.
Elizabeth Njeri, who was orphaned at child birth and is now a healthy ten year old girl, is a beneficiary of such centers. She was found by neighbors in a vulnerable and sickly state back in their Naivasha home where her mother used to live and work in the Naivasha flower plantations. Given her sickly condition Elizabeth had to be admitted at the Kenyatta National Referral Hospital where doctors advised that the hospital should take custody as she had lost her primary care giver and required urgent treatment.
Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother - a resident of Mathare Valley, who luckily adopted her after she was rescued, showed no confidence in leaving her granddaughter in the custody of the Referral Hospital. Given the hospital’s condition that it would have to take full custody , Elizabeth's grandmother opted to leave and take up the burden of caring for Elizabeth. In collaboration with Edra Mbatha, a community worker with twenty years of experience, individual sponsors and well wishers, Elizabeth was fed, counseled and educated.
Edra who worked with the Mathare community, thought to accommodate Elizabeth and her grandmother as she had the advantage of accessing sponsors easily, those of whom worked closely with her in community service. As a counselor and teacher in a day care center in Mathare that fed and rehabilitated street children for a meager fee of 5.00 Kshs per month, Edra invited Elizabeth to the center where she received an elementary education and counseling. Besides education she got nutritional aid at an individual level from sponsors known to Edra which was imperative at her tender age, where she was vulnerable to malnutrition and childhood slated illnesses.
Elizabeth’s situation is one among many where the intervention of the government through the Department of children services is required and can scale-up their interventions to support families caring for OVCs. Coordinating with community workers working with OVCs to identify unreported cases of such families is a credible way to monitor and evaluate how to expand the CT-OVC programme structured to finance families taking care of OVCs.
Twenty years as a counselor and a community worker, Edra has realized that most child care centers that offer boarding facilities to OVCs do not work effectively. The children grow up without affection and a sense of identity which is critical in childhood development. Her knowledge and experience with OVCs like Elizabeth influenced her to form a partnership and start the Mathare Childhood Development day care center which offers abandoned and orphaned children in Mathare with the basic necessities – food, clothing, shelter and education on condition that at least each child should have a responsible parent or guardian.
Mathare Early Childhood Development center which was established in the year 2010,sits a few meters away from the valley that is a landmark in Nairobi’s Mathare slums. Pioneered by Edra Mbatha, a counselor and community worker, the facility operates as a day care center – for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children living in Mathare. Registered as a United Kingdom charity center and locally as a Community Based Organisation (CBO), the center has a unique approach to delivering child care compared to most child care centers.
The center employs six aspects in its bid to be a center of excellence; Education, Health, Nutrition, Play, Counseling and Legal matters that involve child care and development, Edra says. As a trained counselor, she understands that the fight against the OVC menace has to be championed not by plainly delivering on feeding and health matters. “A child needs to be counseled and given an audience to find out what their predicaments are.” she says. Having lived among the Mathare residents for more than two decades, she is well acquainted with the families and sometimes sends ‘spies’ to verify if a given child’s predicament is true. Given her good reputation in the community, the residents make allowance for her to investigate and rescue children in abusive households without any opposition as they are confident in her interventions to bring abusive parents to book for their actions.
Edra advises that child care centers that offer boarding services create disconnect between children and their families. “The children in these boarding centers quickly forget they ever had families and grow up not appreciating love and affection. I would advocate in first identifying a willing and responsible member of the extended family as opposed to quickly sending children to institutions as the first and last result.” she says.
Despite the prevalence of abandoned children and an erosion of extended families, a cause mostly linked to changes in lifestyle, Edra believes that centers like hers work effectively because they create an environment of interaction with the children attending, where they can report cases of abuse experienced at home which she and her team can then investigate and intervene.
Most day care centers in Kenyan slums where households live in dire conditions need ardent interventions to provide basic needs such as food, health and education. Facilities such as the Mathare Early Childhood Development Center under the We The Change Foundation have managed to meet some of these needs by having a feeding and classroom programme, but much of these initiatives are sponsored by foreign partnerships and individual donors.
One of the strategies that were structured by Hope World Wide Kenya program back in 2009 was among others strengthening the capacity of Child Serving Organizations to care for orphans and vulnerable children. It was laid out as a response to the realization that Community Based Organizations played a major role in supporting OVCs but lacked capacity in several areas.
According to the website hopewkenya.org areas that have been supported since the launch of the programme in 2009 include; governance, financial management, general programming, monitoring and evaluation. But with the rise in the OVC cases the state needs to heighten its interventions to unreached but registered non-government and individually sponsored Community Based Organisations such as the Mathare Early Childhood Development Center.
Dr. Pius Mutuku,University of Nairobi,sociologist in the department of sociology and social works pointed out in an interview that financial resources are not the cause of the government’s shorthand in its role in OVC interventions but the lack of political will. An argument he makes by referencing a case in the year 2011 when the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development asked treasury to allocate 10 billion Kshs to the Ministry but to a disgraceful response it was allocated 1.6 billion Kshs.“If the government in collaboration with the African Development Bank allocated 27 billion to the Thika superhighway project to help achieve economic development, you can imagine how many Community Based Organizations it can set up with a similar amount. How the Government can play a bigger role lies with treasury changing its attitude towards social development and identifying it as a priority,” he said.
In the two years since Mathare Early Childhood Development Center was registered, Edra and her team including financial partners of the We The Change Foundation have laid out a five year plan to raise a trust fund for the group of children currently in the center. This trust fund will help fund their secondary school education in light of the subsidized fees offered by the government as stimulus to secondary school education. In addition to this proactive strategy Edra acknowledges that the center is in the process of seeking out at least five scholarships for the children’s tertiary education, an initiative that will see the center partner with foreign universities such as Cambridge and Oxford.
The center now looks forward to its fifteen year program growth plan having laid down the transition structures in an effort to initiate a wholesome approach to the plight of OVCs living in Mathare slums. Edra and her partners may be among the unsung heroes in the front line towards realizing the Millennium Development Goals , but in essence still require support in capacity building. How to achieve this and much more is by the state availing more funds to Child Serving Organizations as well as OVC families while increasing school enrollment, attendance and retention for the OVCs. This is in a proactive bid towards promoting human capital development.
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