This Guidance is a resource for people who work with children and families using a case management approach in middle-income and low-income countries.
It contains information about how to work with children with disabilities and their families.
Basic case management approaches should be the same for all children but there are additional and specific issues and approaches that you should know about when you work with children with disabilities. This Guidance can help you make your current case management procedures, tools and approaches inclusive of children with disabilities. Each section includes links to further reading and additional resources.
Who is this Guidance for?
This Guidance is for people in all regions who work directly with children and families in a government, non-governmental organization (NGO) or community-based system and who have limited or no training specifically on disability.
This can include such social service workers as:
- Professional social workers,
- Paraprofessional social workers,
- Primary health care workers,
- Teachers (particularly kindergarten and primary school teachers),
- Staff of residential institutions,
- Community leaders and
- Volunteer community workers.
Families caring for children with disabilities may also find the resources in this guidance useful, although it is not written explicitly for them. You can also locate hints and tips to help service planners and managers. Although you may work directly with children and families every day, you may have had no training, or have little experience with disability issues.
When you meet a child with a disability and their8 family, you might be worried about how to support the family. You may try and avoid the child and family because you do not know what to do.
This Guidance will help to fill this gap in your training and will help you to understand that children with disabilities are in most respects the same as any other children and have the same rights as all other children, but they may require more support than typically developing children. Their families may be overwhelmed, depressed and scared about the future, and you could be the first person who talks to them openly without pity or fear about their child’s disability. This Guidance will help you to be that person. When you work with a child with a disability, your job is to support them, as far as possible, to overcome difficulties in their day-to-day living which prevent them from realizing their rights. To do this, you must develop a positive way of thinking, about opportunities and not problems; you must think about strengths and not weaknesses; and you must see hope and not despair. This Guidance includes information and tools you can use to help children with disabilities and their families to avoid isolation, exclusion and the possibility of the child being placed in formal or informal alternative care. It can also help you work with children who may already be living in residential institutions and to support their reintegration back to their families and communities.
Any child who comes to the attention of social service workers, whether government, NGO or community-based, can have a disability. For example, a child living and working on the street may have been kept from going to school because they have a disability; a child may be at risk of being placed in formal or informal alternative care because they have a disability and that is causing tensions between a husband and wife. In some cases, a child with a disability can be hidden, until the family comes to the attention of the child protection system for some other reason. In these cases, it is not enough to have only case management training. It is essential to understand the additional support requirements of a child with disabilities, and to understand if and how it is possible for you to address these directly, or by arranging support from another organization.
This means thinking about how to make existing systems inclusive.
In many countries, case management is a basic part of the government approach to delivering social services. In others, it is not yet fully adopted by the government but there is some basic system of social service worker or NGO network that is functioning at the community level.
Whichever part of the system you are working in, at whatever level, you can make a difference for children with disabilities and their families by working to prevent isolation and institutionalization, and to support their inclusion in their community. If a child has already been placed into a residential institution, this can include working to reintegrate them into family care.
