Approximately 3.6 million Kenyan children are orphans or otherwise classified as vulnerable. Of these, 646,887 children are double orphans (that is, they have lost both parents to AIDS, or one parent to AIDS and another to a non-AIDS related cause).
An estimated 104,000 children are living with HIV. (Taking child protection to the next level, 2015). There are 854 ever registered having at least 45,000 children. An unknown number of unregistered institutions exist though.
Children Connections Care majors in family strengthening and family preservations, parental skills, prevention of family separation, counselling, , child family assessment, child reintegration back to the family and community for children outside family care, fostering and adoption with a view of promoting family and community based care for all children.
We work with new mothers who are yet to be discharged from hospitals and teen mothers admitted in residential institutions, struggling families or parents, this cohort is counselled and equipped with parental skills with the view of reduction of abuse and child abandonment. By doing so the rate of child abandonment has reduced, unsafe abortions and care giving ability is improved resulting to good nurturing of their children.
We work in maternity hospitals and with residential institutions (children’s homes) build capacity of the institution’s leadership, donors and funders supporting institutions, providing donor education on how to redirect their support to family and community-based care programming, impart skills and mentor social workers and technical support on safe transitioning of children back to the family and community.
We fully embrace transforming care system global movement. In this regard our work is aligned to the Kenya National Care Reform Strategy for Children. We embrace partnership towards realization of this major realignment in this sector. This is part of the policy of the Kenya government policy of promoting family and community-based care for all children and shifting from institutionalization of children.
Our partners and collaborators can receive technical advice on how to conduct an orderly transformation and transitioning of their childcare programming without harming the children, which will lead to reaching more beneficiaries in the long-term using the existing resources and sustainable.