JSI and USAID Support Programs to Improve the Quality of Life for Children in Adversity

Through the USAID Partnerships Plus project, USAID and JSI are working to improve access to early childhood services and protective family care. The Partnerships Plus grantee organizations and their activities follow.

• Improved Workforce, Improved Lives of Children and Families: Working Together to Move from Evidence to Action. The Global Social Service Workforce Alliance is developing tools, guidance, best practices, training, and/or communications materials that support stakeholders to promote nurturing and protective family care. It is also facilitating collaboration, knowledge exchange, training, and dissemination of resources to improve the safety, wellbeing, and development of children.
• Strengthening Collaboration to Transform Children’s Care. Better Care Network (BCN) fosters collaboration, research, and information sharing on family strengthening and alternative care, and advocates for changes to national, regional, and global policies to improve children’s care situations. BCN will develop a sector-wide data and evidence agenda, including through the development of agreed global care reform indicators to share at the global, regional, and national levels as a country care snapshot. BCN is also a lead in the development of the Global Collaborative Platform on Transforming Children’s Care, which supports strategic, sector-side collaboration among organizations.
• Increasing Knowledge and Building Capacity of Faith-based Organizations to Support Nurturing and Protective Family Care. Faith to Action Initiative is a coalition of organizations that serve the care reform movement by providing resources and outreach to educate and mobilize faith leaders in supporting children in family-based care using evidence-based best practices. Faith to Action will help increase knowledge and build capacity of faith-based organizations to support nurturing and protective family care by developing technical tools, guidance, best practices, training, and communications material and facilitating active collaboration among stakeholders.
• Securing Family-Based Care for Orphans and Vulnerable Children in Ethiopia. Bethany Christian Services Global, working with the Government of Ethiopia, is supporting the development of a new system of alternative family care, moving children out of orphanages and into family care. As part of this project, Bethany will enable 300 children in residential facilities to live in family care by reunifying them with their own families, placing them in foster families, or placing them with adoptive families in Ethiopia.
• Mama Ambassador Program: Building Strong Families and Community Support for Adolescent Mothers in Uganda. Brick by Brick is expanding outreach to young mothers and fathers and their extended family networks with 105 “Mama Ambassadors,” who are supporting 1,000 adolescent mothers and their babies from the seventh month of pregnancy through the first two years of life. It also is strengthening partnerships with community and faith-based leaders and district and national government.
• Early Institutionalization Intervention Impact Project. Through this research project, Boston Children’s Hospital will provide evidence on forms of care that deliver the best outcomes for vulnerable children in Brazil; train caregivers in attachment and attuned caregiving; and encourage a shift to policies that support family care.
• Preventing Violence, Promoting Early Childhood Development: Scaling-Up Home-Visiting in Rwanda. USAID is partnering with Boston College, private foundations, and the Government of Rwanda to improve parent-child relationships and child development outcomes in three districts in Rwanda. Delivered by community-based child protection workers and aligned with the Rwandan social protection system, this activity uses home visiting and caregiver coaching to encourage responsive caregiver-child interactions and discourage violence and harsh punishment among families living in extreme poverty.
• Responsible, Engaged and Loving Fathers Initiative. Plan International, through the REAL Fathers parenting program, is supporting young Rwandan and Senegalese fathers in the development and wellbeing of their young children through responsive caregiving, play and communication, and use of non-violent discipline. The initiative also promotes gender-equal, non-violent relationships between young fathers and their partners.

To learn more about USAID programs to advance the protection and care of children in adversity, visit childreninadversity.gov.