Gender and Child Protection
Since its establishment, child protection had always been FHIDO’s priority area. To effectively address child, abuse cases in its project areas, FHIDO has been working closely with local government partners like police, women and children affairs and the community. As such it has been actively engaged in establishing and strengthening child right committees, organizing frequent refresher trainings, equipping the committee with necessary assistive wok materials. Through its effort, it was able to boost the capacity of child protection committee to timely respond child abuse cases occurring in the community.
The organization has also been working to ensure gender equality in the past through different strategies including working with school boys, girls and adult boys and women in the household to aware on the role of men in the house chores and child care and support and to stand alongside with their sisters and wife’s in all family affairs.
Its regular discussions which have been undertaken at school and community settings on gender equality and GBV and its use of events like World AIDS day, Women’s day as well as the different IEC materials ,radio and TV promotions on gender equality enabled to aware school students, girl’s forum members, school representatives, parents, teachers and government representatives on basic knowledge on gender based violence issues and how to ensure gender equality in the community and school setting. In addition to this, exemplary male who actively supports their wife through household chores and assists their girl child in study have also been awarded to produce other exemplary males.
Moreover, through working with police and child protection committees, it has been closely working to address any form of GBV cases and create reporting procedures for responding domestic abuse timely. Its interventions in gender issues increased awareness, attitudinal and behavioural changes among the target groups regarding gender equality and GBV.
Its interventions have also contributed in creating safe school environments in schools for girls and boys through the implementation of addressing school based GBV. In such projects, FHIDO has been actively involved in strengthening school based gender clubs through capacity building trainings, material supports and improving mini medias involvement and child parliaments in educating the wider school community members on harassment and preventing GBV. The interventions in training and empowerment activities both for girls, boys contributed for girls to voice their concerns and facilitated their leadership and assertiveness in addressing GBV problems specifically faced in the selected project areas. practices to enhance their contribution to other women and girls to seek and defend their rights.
It was also one of the pioneer in initiating the implementation of child code of conduct which was printed and disseminated to all its target schools to respond to any form of school based GBV cases in the schools. This was also complemented with the establishment of suggestion boxes in the school compound to expose those perpetrators and take appropriate actions. Through its school based GBV interventions, FHIDO was able to create a conducive environment for school girls which enabled them feel free to talk about incidences of abuses and to feel confident that their grievances receive sympathetic hearing and prompt redress.