Child’s i Foundation works with the government, local partners, grassroot organisations, and a movement of parents and their children, to highlight the harm and cost of orphanages in Uganda and globally.
Child’s i Foundation is building a roadmap for sustainable alternatives to orphanages: Truly social services run by and for communities to strengthen families and provide the support needed to raise their children in safe and loving families.
The organization is helping to reimagine the whole child protection and care system, repurpose orphanages, and rebuild services at the heart of communities designed to support and strengthen birth, foster and adoptive families.
They plan to support organizations in Uganda to transition and which organizations to work with through self referral (institutions approaching us for support), referral (institutions being referred by someone else e.g. government official and during training. After identification, due diligence is done to determine the appropriate partners.
Where they operate
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Organization Size
Headquarters Location
Uganda
Organization Type
Main Areas of Work
Systems Strengthening
And they work with local partners to create community networks, and work with the Government of Uganda to build a national social workforce, to help a nation reimagine the care of its most vulnerable citizens.
Family Strengthening
They help repurpose orphanages into community hub centres that provide services that prevent family separation in the first place.
Social Work Training
In 2012, Child's i Foundation established Uganda’s first Social Work Centre of Excellence.
Reunification
Child’s i Foundation helps reunite children with their own families where possible and finds loving, Ugandan adoptive or foster families where the child’s own family cannot be found or is unsafe.
Family Tracing
The Child’s i Foundation provides short-term care to children in Uganda, traces their extended families and reunites them or places them with foster/adoptive families.
Advocacy Locally and Through Transform Alliance Africa
Skills Training
Supporting Organisations to Transition to Family-Based Care
Child’s i Foundation plans to support organizations in Uganda to transition. They determine which organizations to work with through self referral (institutions approaching us for support), referral (institutions being referred by someone else e.g. government official and during training. After identification, due diligence is done to determine the appropriate partners.
We asked this organization to tell us a little more about their learning and knowledge sharing practices. Here is what they said
- Transformation of a district
- Advocacy milestones - influencing some of the key policies
- Piloting foster care to enable our own transition
- Transforming a district: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgnY2_wyBR4
- Community development networks and community volunteer work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI7FIu4ICqc&t=14s/
- Child protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIC3ggVHT4w&t=1s
- Always make sure you have political will; this has been both a good and hard lesson for us.
- Let communities lead; they already have most of the solutions, even when you have an idea. This has enabled so much more good and good will.
- Regular programme implementation meetings
- Safeguarding meetings where we discuss child protection issues in practice
- Monitoring and evaluation process - progress report review
- Supervision meetings
- Group supervision, group counselling and reflection meetings
- Through our community groups--peer parent groups/care leavers/adoptive parents/foster carers--we encourage feedback, learning and sharing of experience.
- Development of learning material. We have developed learning material with Makerere University for social work practice.
- We are developing trauma-informed training to upskill social workers supporting young adults to transition from care.
- Participating in learning webinars with other organisations
- Presenting at conferences nationally and globally
Organization Resources
In this video, Maureen Orogot, a Social Worker at Child’s i Foundation in Uganda, shares the progress Child’s i Foundation has made on transitioning from a residential care model of alternative care to professional foster care.
In this video, Juliet Birungi, a social worker at Abide Family Center in Jinja, Uganda, describes the Center’s work to preserve families and prevent family separation.
This video series from Better Care Network, in partnership with Child's i Foundation, highlights promising practices in children's care in Uganda.
In this video Child's i Foundation works with Care 4 Kids, an orphanage for 53 children, which wants to reintegrate children back into families but had challenges convincing the families that they could provide better care. Child's i Foundation organised an open day for families and invited parents who had taken their children back from Rafiki to explain the benefits of children growing up in families.
This video by Child's i Foundation in Uganda document's the journey of a little girl, Praise, from being abandoned to being placed into to a permanent family. The video shows the tracing process and temporary placement with a foster carer, Ruth.
Five years ago, Child's i Foundation founder Lucy Buck set up a 25-bed 'transitional facility' to prove it was possible to place children in need of care into permanent families. Childs' i Foundation piloted an 'emergency care pilot' to see if the
This video from Child's i Foundation documents the story of Mercy from Redeemer House in Jinja, Uganda.