Desarrollo del plan estratégico

children’s rights

entail fulfillment

of four fundamental

basic rights:

1) access to basic needs

and health services

2) right to develop to

their fullest potential

3) right to protection

and

iv. Children’s Right of Participation

The right to participation requires that children should be listened to on any matters or decisions that concern or affect them, and that their views should be given due consideration according to their evolving capacities. The best interest of the child should be a paramount consideration in all decisions and actions concerning children.

Another important aspect for consideration is ensuring the welfare of the children cared for in institutions.1 _{Institutional care should be the last resort} after all other means have failed to provide care. Support and protection of MVC in a family environment should be the best means for a child’s opti- mum development. For children living in institutions, it is important to ensure the following important considerations are met:

• Mechanisms for reunification of children in institutional or residential care with their families and communities should be in place. Children should not be placed in institutional care just because they are disabled, but should be protected and raised in a family environment that ensures their care and psychosocial support.

• Existing mechanisms should ensure the power to interfere with and take necessary and prompt actions where it appears that children’s institu- tions are abusing the rights of the children living there.

• When it comes to foster care and adoption, existing mechanisms should be strengthened to ensure that foster care is guided by the Children’s Home Act. No. 4 of 1968 and adoption ordinance cap. 335 of 1955. Resource availability (material and financial) is always among the major constraints for scaling up MVC responses. One of the measures proposed to resolve this con- straint is the establishment of the MVC Fund at the local government and community levels. The main functions of the MVC fund will be as follows:

i. Support local NGOs, CBOs, and local support groups involved in the care and protection of OVC, and vulnerable households taking care of OVC. ii. Support education, scholarship, and medical treatment of OVC and develop-

ment of their vocational training skills; and provide working tools to OVC on a soft credit basis as a mean to reduce poverty among them.

iii. Strengthen community capacity and local government authorities in order to reach more OVC and provide high-quality care and strengthen the capacity of the Department of Social Welfare to provide technical support.

iv. Support coordination at all levels; monitoring and evaluation; data collection, analysis, interpretation, and its use; and research activities related to OVC. v. Provide direct support to MVC and care-givers in terms of livelihood for

survival as a short-term strategy and Income Generating Activities (IGA) as a long-term strategy.

The Guidelines for Community-based Care, Support, and Protection of MVC provide mea- sures and responsibilities to ensure that MVC enjoy basic rights and health services.

These measures and responsibilities are considered in the relevant chapters of this action plan.

The need to enhance and provide social protection and security to children—espe- cially MVC—is necessitated to a great extent by the weakening and even breaking down in some communities of the traditional systems that had safety nets offering protection and security to children. Since there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of MVC in Tanzania and AIDS has stood out as a major factor for orphan- hood, traditional safety nets are overburdened and overstretched. Furthermore, safety nets have always been invoked to prevent children from falling below a given stan- dard and are normally a short-term emergency measure.

Once the providers of those safety nets become overburdened, the safety nets gradu- ally stop working, as for MVC in Tanzania. Parallel with this, the existing policy and legal framework does not sufficiently provide for the protection and security of children—especially those who have already been categorized as MVC.

Research and various studies have come up with findings that cases of child abuse and neglect are on the rise. Corporal punishment, which by global consensus is an inhuman treatment, is legalized in primary schools and tolerated in secondary schools and homes. Cases of sexual violence against children in their communities and by close relatives or dependants within their family; female genital mutilation; and other social vices like children being used for drug peddling or sex work are common.

Increased poverty—especially at the household level—is complicated further by other factors. Many children are subjected to child labor in order to support their families.

Current responses in Social Security and Child Protection

As already indicated in the NCPA, current systems that exist in Tanzania for caring for MVC are still fragmented. At the core is the Department of Social Welfare (DSW), which develops guidelines and mechanisms for services. The DSW has inadequate resources and, until recently, has had a relatively low profile. Government-run social welfare schemes, large international initiatives, and an array of faith-based organiza- tions (FBOs) and community-based organizations (CBOs) provide services but typi- cally do not work together as a cohesive group. Though MVC support is the mandate of the DSW, the department has had inadequate human and financial resources to respond on a large scale. Moreover, responses to MVC in Tanzania have traditionally relied on extended family networks. With increasing numbers of orphans and MVC due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the traditional social safety net is now overextended and disintegrating.

Though DSW has made significant progress in developing a nationally applicable support mechanism, its scale is still far too small to address the majority of MVC and achieve the necessary coordination. Besides, the DSW’s presence and its role within each district are not well understood. Many communities confuse the role and functions of the DSW with those of the Community Development Department. The Community Development Department mobilizes communities to help plan and implement social economic activities on a larger scale. The DSW is supposed to work with individuals and groups to ensure that they gain access to basic social services—a

daunting challenge for the DSW because it must work within a centralized government system while trying to address complex problems at the community level. Moreover, the DSW has extremely limited staffing. To date, the DSW has only been able to place a social welfare officer in about 30 percent of the 119 districts in Tanzania. The remaining districts rely on regional coverage by just a few officers. In many districts, there is no coverage at all. Indeed, social welfare officers are assigned a range of responsibilities that can include everything from ensuring social welfare administra- tion at hospitals and clinics to defending the rights of disabled individuals. Social welfare officers are often expected to pull together non-state resources within their community to ensure that people’s needs are met.

In responding to these challenges, the DSW, through the Ministry of Labour, Youth Development and Sports, has recruited an additional 17 social welfare officers, and is in the process of recruiting additional officers in all districts. Furthermore, the DSW is in the process of decentralizing social welfare services to local government authorities, which will have a mandate to employ such services and pay salaries as any other local authority cadre. The process will enable mainstreaming of social welfare services, plans, activities, and budgets in the local authorities’ plans, and their representation in the district management team.

In protecting children from falling into the worst forms of labor and withdrawing and rehabilitating those who are already in such employment, the government in imple- menting its international commitments—ratified ILO Conventions 138 regarding the minimum age of employment and 182 relating to the worst forms of labor—and has locally committed itself to develop and implement a time bound program aimed at achieving a sustainable elimination of the worst forms of child labor by the year 2010. The government will also create a social foundation to address all forms of child labor. Before this program, the government had already registered significant achievements in addressing the problem of child labor by participating in the IPEC program since 1995. The government, with the support of ILO/IPEC, convened a national roundtable in 2001 to set priorities and targets for the implementation of the time bound program. This roundtable provided stakeholders with a conceptual understanding of the worst forms of labor. It also served as a forum for defining target groups, identifying sectors and locations associated with the worst forms of child labor, and reaching a consen- sus on modalities for implementation. The program has two major components: (i) creation of an enabling environment that is conducive to eliminating the worst forms of child labor; and (ii) provision of direct support to the priority-targeted groups in selected districts. In order to achieve the two components, three inputs were designed:

i. A series of social protection measures aimed at providing viable alternatives to children at risk of being subjected to child labor, and those who are with- drawn from work as well as their families. The measures include economic empowerment to the target children’s families; awareness-raising on child labor problems and its negative consequences on the welfare of children;

Since there has been