• Cases of child abuse on the rise; physical punishment of children by parents is increasing
• More children being placed into State orphanages by parents unable to provide for them
• 80% of children and parents feel that children are not safe as compared to 20% pre-Covid
• National resources allocated for child and youth development have seen a downward trend
• Digital divide in Sri Lanka further disenfranchised children from accessing online education
• Govt. should ensure equal educational opportunities and compulsory free education for all

According to the emergency rapid assessment conducted by the International Federation of Red Cross in 2022, an estimated 2.3 million children – nearly half of all children in Sri Lanka – require some form of humanitarian support, said ChildFund International Asia Region Regional Director Hanneke Oudkerk, in an interview with The Sunday Morning.

Oudkerk added that according to the Probation Department and the National Child Protection Authority, cases of child abuse are on the rise and physical punishment of children by parents is increasing as a negative coping mechanism due to higher mental stress.

“More children are placed into State orphanages by desperate parents unable to provide for them; 80% of children and parents have expressed that they feel their children are not safe as compared to 20% during the pre-Covid times. Children are increasingly being exposed to serious child protection harms such as sexual abuse, physical assaults, neglect, and online violence. To top it all, the national resources allocated for child and youth development have seen a downward trend,” she continued.

Oudkerk emphasised on the importance of protecting children from malnutrition, bringing children back to school, and supporting and improving the competencies of children who had to discontinue schooling during the crisis.

While ChildFund International just turned 85, ChildFund Sri Lanka has been operational for 38 years. ChildFund reached 21.1 million children and family members in 23 countries in 2022, and, based on its ‘Growing Connections’ strategy, it wants to take that number to 100 million by 2030. ChildFund Sri Lanka is committed to contributing to this ambitious goal, said Oudkerk, with plans to reach one million children and family members in Sri Lanka by 2026.

Following are excerpts of the interview:

You’re here in Sri Lanka to celebrate the 85th anniversary of ChildFund International. What are the ongoing programmes in Sri Lanka and how would you describe the progress made over the last 38 years in Sri Lanka?

We celebrated ChildFund International’s 85th anniversary with the Sri Lanka team. It is a moment for us to reflect on our achievements in ensuring children are healthy, educated, skilled, and safe wherever they are, and, at the same time, we realise that we have so much more to do in times when children are disproportionately affected by poverty, pandemics, climate change, and disasters. 

In 2022, ChildFund reached 21.1 million children and family members in 23 countries, but based on our ‘Growing Connections’ strategy, we want to take that number to 100 million by 2030. 

ChildFund Sri Lanka is committed to contributing to this ambitious goal. We will reach one million children and family members in Sri Lanka by 2026. To this end, the Sri Lanka office is making sure our programmes are centred on providing children with access to quality education, healthcare, nutrition, and protection from abuse and exploitation. 

We believe in a holistic approach to child development, recognising the importance of addressing all aspects of a child’s life, including their physical, emotional, social, and cognitive well-being. Through various programmes and initiatives, ChildFund Sri Lanka aims to break the cycle of poverty and create long-term sustainable change for children and their communities. In 2022, we reached over 200,000 children and family members in Sri Lanka.  

Some of our notable programmes in Sri Lanka are:

1. Food security and livelihood assistance: the project aims to protect children living in vulnerable circumstances from malnutrition and at the same time support their families to enhance their food security by making sustainable markets accessible to them and supporting them in generating additional income. We are implementing the project in Nuwara Eliya and Puttalam. 

2. Improving literacy and numeracy through digital education: we are implementing digital delivery of foundational educational skills in literacy and numeracy improvement for children in primary education. The programme established ‘10 Digital Learning Hubs’ that will deliver learning modules to improve the core literacy and numeracy skills of children. It will also contribute towards developing a holistic well-rounded child by delivering modules on socio-emotional learning, and also facilitate opportunities to access digital learning. 

3. Skilled and involved youth: the programme focuses on upskilling young people to be employed or self-employed in professions of their choice and to act as change agents in their families and communities. We take a two-pronged approach to address the issue of youth unemployment and the lack of skills and confidence evident among youth in Sri Lanka: 1) through youth civic engagement we focus on developing leadership skills, youth club mobilisation, youth-led community, and youth-led advocacy programmes for child protection, environmental conservation, and rural development. We also focus on sexual and reproductive health education and improving access to quality sexual reproductive health information and services and 2) our youth work readiness programme focuses on career guidance, vocational skill development, entrepreneurial skill development, and social-emotional skill development.

4. Climate finance for community resilience programme: this programme is set to be launched in February 2024. It aims to make rural communities, especially the small landholder farmers, and their ecosystems less vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change such as severe droughts and floods. The project has three key outcomes: 1) women, children, and their community have equitable access to climate-resilient water systems, leading to improved health and hygiene; 2) women, children, and their community have equitable access to sustainable climate-resilient food systems and green livelihoods i.e. agriculture leading to food security and poverty alleviation; and 3) local partners have the required capacity to support disaster risk reduction and climate change programming and financing. We will be piloting the project in Koralai Pattu South Division, Batticaloa District.

ChildFund Sri Lanka works across 12 districts with children, youth, and communities to ensure that all children from birth grow up to be healthy, safe, educated, and skilled despite their backgrounds. What are the key challenges the organisation has faced while working in Sri Lanka and which areas need the most assistance?

The biggest challenge we face currently is to ameliorate the lives of children, young people, and families affected by the impacts of Covid-19 and the economic crisis that reversed the development gain Sri Lanka made in the past decade in areas of child health, education, skill development, and protection.

According to the emergency rapid assessment conducted by the International Federation of Red Cross in 2022, an estimated 2.3 million children, nearly half of all children in Sri Lanka, require some form of humanitarian support. Cases of child abuse are on the rise and physical punishment of children by parents is increasing as a negative coping mechanism as a result of higher mental stress, according to the Probation Department and the National Child Protection Authority. 

More children are placed into State orphanages by desperate parents unable to provide for them; 80% of children and parents have expressed that they feel their children are not safe as compared to 20% during the pre-Covid times. Children are increasingly being exposed to serious child protection harms such as sexual abuse, physical assaults, neglect, and online violence. To top it all, the national resources allocated for child and youth development have seen a downward trend. 

The areas that need the most assistance are to protect children from malnutrition, bring children back to school, support and improve the competencies of children who had to discontinue schooling due to the lack of access to digital technologies and other resources during the crisis, along with supporting young people to develop professional and entrepreneurial skills to choose the profession of their choice and, lastly, responding to the climate crisis that will impact children and young people the most. 

In the backdrop of the ongoing economic crisis in Sri Lanka, which came hot on the heels of the Covid pandemic and resulted in repeated school closures, how would you describe the impact on children in Sri Lanka?

In Sri Lanka, children were disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, but the situation was compounded by the economic crisis that led to a high school dropout rate. 

According to the emergency rapid assessment conducted by the International Federation of Red Cross in 2022, one in 10 (11%) households surveyed admitted that their children would drop out of school if their household needs were not met. In the estates, the figure was 24%. 

Meanwhile, 66% of children reported less than 80% of daily school attendance between March and May 2022 and 77% of children reported that they had reduced their after-school education time because of the constant power outages, transportation issues, and parents not being able to afford the high cost of extra classes, stationery, and school meals. 

Besides, the digital divide in Sri Lanka further disenfranchised children from accessing online education, resulting in pushing them further behind as compared to those who had access to digital technologies. 

How did ChildFund operate amid the Covid pandemic and economic crisis in Sri Lanka and what steps did it take to ensure children’s health, education, and safety?

ChildFund Sri Lanka continued its child development work even in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic crisis. With the disrupted livelihoods, surmounting food insecurity and malnutrition, extended school closures, and child safety and protection issues due to the crisis, ChildFund Sri Lanka identified the need for a local and sustainable approach. 

We designed a localised approach in order to build community resilience through Community Response Hubs (CRHs). The CRH mechanism is a rights-based approach to localise decision-making and empower communities at the village level to respond to their own needs and develop sustainable solutions deeply embedded in the local context. The communities play a pivotal role in designing, planning, implementing, and monitoring interventions to address their critical needs like food security, nutrition, education, child protection, livelihoods, youth civic engagement, and psychosocial well-being.

It served as a conduit and a nucleus for development activities at the village level such as:

1. Improving food intake among children and pregnant and lactating mothers by setting up community kitchens

2. Ensuring food security at the community and household level by setting up community/home gardens

3. Creating viable income sources for youth by market linkages

4. Setting up child-centred spaces to ensure the psychosocial well-being of children and youth

5. Ensuring children are engaged and continue education by setting up additional educational support mechanisms

We believe that empowered communities can make better decisions for children, ensuring that they live healthily, continue their education, are supported with livelihood opportunities, and are provided with a safe and secure environment where they survive and thrive. 

As things stand, what should the Government and Sri Lanka’s educators prioritise in terms of ensuring children’s well-being?

We want the Government to ensure equal educational opportunities and compulsory free education for all. 

By strengthening the education system, and allowing students to develop intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally, we can create holistic citizens who can contribute to Sri Lanka’s growth story. Moreover, we need a school curriculum geared towards improving a child’s cognitive and socio-emotional skills, and core competencies which are needed for making them future-ready and preparing them for a world of work. We can do that by:

• Establishing a safe teaching and learning environment
• Focusing on the socio-emotional skills of students through a holistic curriculum
• Promoting national identity, ethics, and cultural values
• Continuing the development of curricula for science, mathematics, technology, and English education
• Deploying professionally-qualified teachers and educational personnel and providing them with continuous training and learning
• Establishing evidence-based policymaking and planning

In order to build back better, we need to bring the children living in underserved communities up to speed with the needed competencies and skills through ChildFund’s integrated education programmes mentioned above. We also need Government support to allocate national resources to bridge the digital divide and support children with their educational needs. 

Could you tell us about ChildFund’s focus on ‘connections’ and how having connections as a core in its programmes acts as a differentiator in the child development space?

What sets ChildFund apart from other child development organisations is that our identity is rooted in connections. We create, reinforce, and sustain connections in many ways, from the one-to-one sponsorship relationship to the child’s relationships within their family and community and with donors, systems, services, governments, and more. 

The qualities of healthy connections we forge provide guiding principles for our work to achieve our purpose for children.

ChildFund also works with children and youth with disabilities. Could you tell us about local programmes in this regard?

To ensure equal opportunities for all, we implement a community-based inclusive development programme for children and youth with disabilities. According to a UNESCAP report, people with disabilities constitute 8.7% of the total population of Sri Lanka. They are at a heightened risk of discrimination and stigma due to gender and their disability. 

To ensure they are healthy, educated, skilled, and safe, our programme ensures the health and rehabilitation of children and youth with disabilities, quality education, and livelihood opportunities. 

We have thus far benefitted 55,000 family members of 11,000 children with disabilities through access to education and skill development; 10,000 youth with disabilities and their family members have been skilled and engaged in economic activities, 15,000 parents of children with disabilities have benefitted from disability awareness initiatives, and, last but not least, we have strengthened 30 disability organisations. 

Do the Sri Lankan State and private sector support your efforts here? Is more support and collaboration needed and in which areas?

ChildFund Sri Lanka places great impetus on working in collaboration with the Government. We implement our programmes in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and Department of Social Services. We also depend on the private sector and doubled our share of corporate support and engagement in 2023 as compared to 2022. 

To respond to some of the toughest challenges such as climate change, malnutrition, poverty, online child sexual exploitation and abuse, disruption in education, etc., we need a multi-stakeholder approach where each player plays a pivotal role in ensuring children reach their full potential. 

To give an example of our recent multi-stakeholder collaboration, we introduced five vocational skill training curricula designed to empower youth with disabilities. These curricula aim to provide a supportive and inclusive environment for youth with disabilities to acquire essential skills that will equip them for personal growth, employment prospects, and overall independence. 

The vocational training curriculum includes computer graphic designing, mobile phone repairing, hospitality, sales, and plumbing. A comprehensive study was conducted to identify the market demand for skills and gap areas in the existing training curriculum in collaboration with the University of Kelaniya Faculty of Medicine Department of Disability Studies. For the development of five curricula, five committees were formed with experts from various Government departments, training institutes, and private sectors. 

Further, an orientation package was developed along with the Department of Social Services for orientation of newly-enrolled youth with disabilities to facilitate their smooth transition from home to vocational training centres. These initiatives are part of the ‘Socio-economic Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Sri Lanka through Community-Based Inclusive Development (CBID)’ project supported by Lipoid Stiftung.

You led development programmes in Nepal and Sri Lanka just over a decade ago. What are the key changes you see since then and which areas need improvement?

During my stay in Nepal, I was working in HIV and AIDS programming. Looking at the numbers, the prevalence of HIV and AIDS incidence has gone down slightly, which is a welcome development. Yet, there are other challenges such as inequalities across gender, caste, geographic regions, and others that need to be dealt with. As the inequality in Nepal increases, the loss in human development also increases. 

I was in Sri Lanka from 2008 to 2012, and at the time I worked in the child development space and supported education in rural areas, from early childhood to vocational training. We also supported projects for children with disabilities and their families. These issues are still relevant today, compounded by newer challenges such as climate change.