COFCAWE safeguarding intervention
The safety and well-being of children is central to our ethos, and we expect all our community members, staff and volunteers to share this commitment.
COFCAWE’s work involves interfacing with especially adolescent girls who are either prone to, or have already been sexually abused, COFCAWE has always been committed to and placed a high priority on preventing and responding to any form of sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse, including that which may arise out of the work of our own staff, representatives, or volunteers.
COFCAWE has been responding to instances where under-age girls have been defiled or forcefully married by working with the police and local authorities to intervene and stop the marriage.
In a small number of instances, we have succeeded in rescuing these girls from the early marriages, but in others, we have been unable to do much, largely due to our limited resources to follow the matters through to their logical conclusion.
In 2021, COFCAWE developed a strategy of establishing community safeguarding committees (SGC) and equipped them to execute their child protection role in the community. These committees comprise of parents, teachers, village health team workers and local leaders and they are intended to identify, report and follow-up child abuse cases to the local authorities
Selection and identification process of SGC members
COFCAWE conducts a training for parents on positive parenting, child protection, gender issues, SRH among other things. The participants usually include couples, teachers, religious leaders and local council leaders with the aim of making impact as they use various platforms to reach out to others. After the 3 days training, 5 influential people are elected to comprise the safe guarding committee charged with a responsibility of identification, reporting and following up of abuse cases in the community.
Composition of the SGC committee
The vice chairperson who is responsible for child affairs on the local council committee (a government structure) is a member of the committee plus a teacher, religious leader and two parents.