Public-private partnership needed to sustain residential homes for orphaned children

Public-Private partnership is needed to sustain residential homes for orphaned children. The government has developed a set of national standards for residential homes for orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) to ensure that the homes meet minimum standards.

The standards require that orphanages improve nutrition and food supplementation, enhance the basic health and hygiene situation of the homes and empower and train caregivers, so that they can deliver better services to the children in their care.

This was made known by the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, at a forum in Accra to deliberate on how to sustain the supply of basic needs to orphaned and vulnerable children in residential homes.

Nana Lithur emphasised that although institutionalised care for vulnerable children was not the objective of the government, some children found themselves in those facilities through no fault of theirs.

Those children, she said, encountered various challenges in the orphanages, sometimes through genuine challenges faced by the management of the institutions.

“Key among these challenges is funding, which manifests in various forms, including poor nutritional supply and health concerns for the children in these facilities,” Nana Lithur said.

The forum was to create an avenue for the ministry to partner the corporate sector, in line with the government’s public-private partnership (PPP) policy to sustain the supply of their basic needs, which is fundamental to their existence.

Rationale for the forum

It was necessitated by the need to find a means to sustain a five-year programme, which started in 2011 and titled -”One Child, One World” (OCOW), to address malnourishment and limited access to necessary nutritional requirements for normal growth and development in residential homes for OVCs.

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The programme, which ends in 2015, is being implemented by AmeriCares, a United States organisation, and two local bodies, Hope for All Foundation (HOFA) and the Youth and Social Enterprise Fund (Y-SEF).

The partnership was formed to respond to the financial difficulties faced by orphanages due to the increase in the number of orphaned children, sometimes resulting in malnourishment and limited access to necessary nutritional requirements for normal growth and development. 

The project addresses the nutritional and health needs of 1,500 orphans and vulnerable children and their over 319 caregivers living in 30 homes in nine out of the 10 regions of the country.

Baseline Assessment

In a presentation of the programme at the meeting, Ms Elikem Tomety Archer, the Director of Mid-East and Africa Partnerships of AmeriCares, said the OCOW programme was launched in July 2011  and a baseline assessment completed in December 2011.

Thirty homes were fully vetted and approved by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) to participate in the survey.

It was observed during the baseline study, she said, that the proportion of children in homes who were considered underweight or wasting was about twice the levels found among Ghanaian children outside the homes

A significant proportion of children are fed less than two times a day and majority caregivers and  proprietors said food/nutrition was the biggest unmet need for the children in the homes, followed by financial support, healthcare costs, educational/school fees and training of caregivers.

Accomplishments to date

Ms Archer said since 2011, AmeriCares had delivered 11 shipments of nutritional supplements, infant formula, and hygiene products worth US$1,045,186 to these homes.

One hundred and one caregivers in the 30 homes had also been trained in basic nutrition, health and hygiene practices and funds to train an additional 109 caregivers had been granted, she added. 

Programme Sustainability

She pointed out that majority of proprietors and caregivers of the homes, as well as other stakeholders, had lauded the programme as having gone a long way to meet some of the unmet needs of children in the homes, hence the need to sustain it beyond the programme period had become imperative. 

“As we enter the third year, there are plans to scale up the programme to at least 100 homes. This will require about GH¢500,000-GH¢800,000 in kind and in cash donations from corporate bodies who would love to adopt those homes as part of their corporate social responsibility,” Ms Archer said.

The idea, she said, was to ensure that participating companies benefited as they gave, as part of a “cause-related marketing relationship” by enhancing the brand image of their products, while at the same time supporting the initiative to raise the necessary funds to support the OCOW programme and thereby address a huge socio-economic issue that afflicted thousands of Ghanaian children.