Last year, we piloted our Mother and Baby Centre to see if we could help prevent abandonment by providing support to vulnerable mothers and their babies. The centre was a success and we learnt a lot, but the main lesson was that the women who came to our centre from the local community benefitted a lot more than the six mothers who lived with us residentially. So, after much discussion with experts and stakeholders, we have decided to make our prevention service non-residential and support mothers in their homes, enabling us to help even more women in crisis.
All of our project are pilots. In fact, I was told not to even call it a pilot, but view it more as a ‘proof of concept’ – we want to prove our concept works and with your support, we’re really demonstrating that transitional care is possible in Uganda. We had no idea whether we could resettle children back into families, but we’ve managed to place 43 children into families after an average stay of five months. We were told this would be impossible, but now we are working closely with the government and we want to share our model of care to help other institutions provide transitional care as an alternative to long-term institutionalisation.
We’ve learnt that there are many young mothers out there ready to abandon their babies but, given the choice and a little support, we can prevent this happening. So many mothers turn up at our centre that we always have an on-call social worker on hand to give guidance, support and advice. Sometimes, when the family has rejected the mother because of the pregnancy, all it takes is a third party to help them come to terms with the new baby and often all a mother needs is a small amount of money to help with a few months’ rent.
If the mother is truly destitute, we’ve exhausted all other options and the child is at risk, we admit the child into Malaika but encourage the mother to spend as much time with her baby as she can, learning how to be a good parent. At the same time, our social work team work with them to help change their circumstances so they can afford to keep their baby.
Reunited with Mum
But this is not the end of our intervention. When the child goes back home to their family, we work with them for up to a year to ensure the child is safe. We have some incredible Family Support Workers, who visit families frequently and teach them good parenting. Here is a film made by our new volunteer Tom Hollings about the work our Family Support Worker does with one of her families:
As usual, we couldn’t do this without you. Thank you to everyone who has made Child’s i Foundation what it is today, and thank you for continually supporting our work and being part of a community who believe the best place for a child is in a family.
