Hope for Justice’s team have been involved in developing a National Child Protection Case Management Framework with UNICEF and the Ethiopian Government so that social workers and community services are able to identify vulnerable children, fully assess their needs, and connect them into all the relevant sources of support they require.
Case management is a way of providing support in a social work setting. It means the needs of an individual child and their family are addressed in an appropriate, systematic and timely way. It involves different services working together to ensure that the full range of a child’s needs and vulnerabilities – physical, psychological, financial, social and emotional – are addressed. Case management means delivering support that focuses on the needs of an individual child and what is in their best interests.
The aim behind developing and rolling out the National Child Protection Case Management Framework is to ensure that all at-risk children receive this kind of integrated and individualised support. In order to ensure this consistency, case managers – the social work professionals responsible for coordinating the support the child receives – have to be well supervised and coached. So, Hope for Justice were commissioned by UNICEF to deliver five days on training on “Supervision and Coaching within a Child Protection Case Management Framework” to social service providers at national and regional levels. This included professionals from the Ministry of Women and Social Affairs, the Regional Woman, Children and Social Affairs Bureau, and the Ethiopian Society of Sociologists, Social Workers and Anthropologists.
We used a Train-the-Trainer model so that the professionals who received our training can cascade it to others within their organisations and networks. As a result, we hope to have built the capacity of organisations across the country to implement the Child Protection Case Management Framework, and ultimately to have achieved better support and protection for vulnerable children all over Ethiopia.
