This sample proposal is about a project that seeks to reduce the suffering of orphans and vulnerable children in Uganda by giving them love, care, and support and introducing skills that will lead to their contribution to society.
The Project Proposal
Introduction
The education of the world’s children is high on the global agenda. In the context of education for all (EFA), all children should receive free, good-quality education. The reality is that millions of the world’s children are too poor to benefit from the declaration unless there are special interventions that target their development. Unfortunately, such children do not form a special social category in poverty eradication intervention programs. Thus, their inclusion in the achievement of EFA appears to be a hit-or-miss phenomenon. Recognizing the central role of poverty eradication in wider global agendas and acknowledging the need to reach out to the poorest children with the objective to break the poverty cycle for them, XXXXXX embarked on a program of education and poverty eradication.
The Project aims at solving the problems hidden by the fact that orphans and vulnerable children are invisible; yet by the very nature of their situation, they are included among those that are classified as disadvantaged and poor in Uganda. Children are subsumed within the poverty categories most often referred to such as households, communities, and people – which means that there is a high tendency to focus on adult-related poverty while child problems are ignored, partly because children have little power and influence within a group that contains adults.
Findings reflect that children with abject problems can be recognized by rather elementary (as opposed to sophisticated) criteria. Top on the list is the absence of basic necessities such as shelter, food, clothing, and water. Equally important is the ‘human condition’ in terms of physical health and parental care and protection. Schooling is high on the list as a critical criterion in determining who is extremely or modestly a vulnerable and disadvantaged child.
While there seems to be a national consensus among donors, the public sector, and civil society that the government has made commendable progress in implementing PEAP (Poverty Eradication Action Plan) as flexibly as possible, its evolving nature, due to the participatory and consultative reviews it undergoes regularly, does not address many of the development challenges Disadvantaged children face today. It would take lobbying and advocacy interventions to ensure that the needs and demands of children in abject poverty are met.
The UNESCO 2003 study on Children in Abject Poverty in Uganda revealed that health and inadequate health services remain critical challenges for children in abject poverty. This is aggravated by the living conditions of children in almost all the districts studied.
On a positive note, over three-quarters of those who fell sick sought some kind of modern treatment; very few resort to traditional healers.
School-related costs have been the major obstacle for children in abject poverty to access education.
Problem Statement
Due to the increasing deaths of people as a result of HIV/AIDS so many children have been left as orphans with nobody to take care of them and give them support. Most of the children are left with their poor grandparents and some are left homeless hence ending up on the streets.
Only 11% of urban births and 3.4% of rural births are registered, meaning that the majority of children are denied this basic right. Approximately 96% of the poor, the majority of whom are women, live in rural areas (UBOS, 2000, 2003). A UNICEF project document (2003) on orphans and vulnerable children indicates that approximately 2.1 million children in Uganda are orphaned and, of these, 80% come from poor families.
The child-headed household trend in Uganda is such that rural areas have 79.9%, of which 49.6% are male-headed and 30.3% are female-headed. The trend in urban areas is that of the 20% child-headed households, 10.5% are male-headed whereas 9.6% are female-headed.
Children’s vulnerability to poverty, adversity, and HIV/AIDS is largely contextual but also indicative of the widespread situation in protecting them.
Uganda currently has over 2 million orphaned children, the majority of whom were orphaned by HIV/AIDS (Uganda Poverty Status Report, 2003). The number is expected to rise in the next decade and this will increase the risk of children turning to the streets, and becoming beggars and thieves.
The rise in the proportion of child-headed households and child laborers means a rise in percentages of the illiterate, early pregnancies, and related consequences such as infant and maternal mortality rates, increased incidence of those who are infected by sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and HIV/AIDS, and drug abuse. While the Government will continue to increase spending on reproductive health services, it will also be losing valuable human resources. The cycle of child poverty will thus be passed on to the next generation and become chronic. It is evident that the HIV/AIDS scourge is increasingly taking its toll on those who should otherwise be enjoying childhood in Uganda.
A large proportion of deprived children have acquired psychopathological behavior, increasingly becoming involve,d in crime, drug abuse and violence. Many, too, are vulnerable to HIV/AIDS and yet enter the labor market at very young ages, all of which seriously affects their growth and well-being. Children under this category experience extreme poverty, which is compounde,d household, community and national poverty.
The 2001/2002 participatory poverty assessment by the Uganda Participatory Poverty
Assessment Process (UPPAP), and Save the Children UK studies on child poverty confirmed that children are a vulnerable category of the population, and that policy and institutional frameworks are taking longer to cope with changing sources of crisis and adversity. A link between large/polygamous families with poverty, and the high level of the household population (six to eight members), increases the difficulty of providing adequate coverage and quality of public services such as education, health and housing for families, especially for children. Poor health reduces the productive capacity of households and limits children’s access to their basic needs.
The magnitude and complexity of the problem of child poverty in Uganda are large and growing, and cannot be ignored when designing national development and poverty reduction strategies. Unfortunately, children and young people continue to be marginalized in spite of interventions, especially where assumptions are made that interventions that address adult and household needs are also good for all children, including boys and girls of school-going and non-school-going ages. This partly explains why child poverty is underrepresented in most studies on poverty in Uganda (2003).
Project Justification
The rationale for carrying out this study on children in abject poverty in Uganda is based on the problems resulting from the fact that children in poverty are invisible, yet they constitute a disproportionately large section of the (poor) population. Children are subsumed within the most referred to poverty categories: households, communities, and people; yet among these, they always occupy a position of least power and influence (2003), and focus tends to concentrate on adult-related poverty. Children are vulnerable to shocks and adversities and, consequently, are hardest hit by poverty. Given that childhood is the most crucial developmental period in an individual’s lifetime, any damage at this stage can lead to a perpetuation of the cycles of poverty, resulting in intergenerational and/or chronic poverty. Interventions such as universal primary education, and maternal and childcare mitigate against the monumental odds.
This program is already running in XXXX Village but the children who number up to 70 are living in a rented homes and 200 are living in homes of their guardians and other people who endeavored to give them care. The focus of XXXX now is to acquire land and establish a rehabilitation center for these children, a home as well as a primary school. In this program, XXXX – also seeks to provide logistics to these children.
The reasons why we are advocating a rehabilitation center are: the problems we are facing when these children are in other people’s homes. For example, the logistics given to them are sometimes taken away from them, they are denied to go to school and when they fall sick medication is not adequate.
Project Purpose
The purpose of this project is to reduce the suffering of orphans and vulnerable children and build their capacity by giving them love, care, education, and simple activities to do so that they become productive in society.
Objectives
- To improve the quality of life of the orphans and vulnerable children by establishing a permanent home, school and health care center for them.
- To train caregivers in caregiving skills to enable these children to get adequate care, love, and support
- To provide adequate education to these children to make them good citizens and have a better future through good education right from a tender age
- To create awareness to the community and the outside world of the need to protect and support vulnerable children and orphans as well as protect their rights.
Comparisons of studies and child perspectives
- Child poverty can be analyzed both subjectively and objectively. Studies such as the Save the Children UK 2003 study have analyzed child poverty indicators on the basis of how they relate to institutional frameworks through which monitoring would be effected.
Characteristics of child poverty in key domains
Personal, emotional, and spiritual well-being
- Lack of parental guidance, care, and love
- Not having the means to get what one wants
- Inability to solve daily problems, both as a result of lack of money as well as lack of initiative and innovation that results from financial poverty (‘poverty of the mind’)
- Being dependent on others
- Lack of religious grounding
- Discrimination and deprivation
- Alcohol abuse by parents
Physical well-being
- Lack of access to health care (medicine, immunization)
- Vulnerable to disease, especially HIV/AIDs and malaria
Family and social well-being
- Lack of one or both parents
- Being forced to live on the street because parents cannot support all/any of children
- Family breakdown
- Polygamous family
- Households with many children and with no use of family planning
- Inability to enrol in school or to pursue education on an ongoing basis as a result of school costs, uniform, books, pens, etc.
Lack of protection from abuse, exploitation
Financial and material well-being
- Lack of money, clothing, food, accommodation, material goods such as bicycles, books, bedding, cooking
- Lack of land
- Lack of skills
- Lack of opportunities and sources of income
- Child labor exploitation
- Lack of access to transport and Communication facilities.
Political well-being
- Lack of freedom of speech
- Living in a war-affected area
- Lack of security
Environmental well-being
- Living in an area susceptible to land Slides, floods and drought
- Lack of clean and safe water
- Lack of latrines
