Executive summary
Family Reintegration and Prevention of Separation (FRAPS) is a four-year (2016-2019) Comic Relief-supported project, implemented in partnership with Tigers Club (TC) and Child Restoration Outreach
(CRO) in selected sub-counties of Wakiso and Mbale districts of Uganda. The project’s aim is to provide care and protection of highly vulnerable children, young people and families in communities who are at risk of coming to the streets, via four main objectives:
1. Children and young people on the streets have improved access to services to protect them from violence, exploitation and abuse and to help them move towards family reintegration.
2. Children and young people (re)integrate into safer and more socially and economically stronger families or family-based care.
3. Children, adults and community leaders (child protection committee members, local council members, religious and traditional leaders) gain child protection knowledge and act to make their communities safer.
4. Stakeholders (government officials and local organisation staff) in Wakiso & Mbale District are better connected, generate learning and agree on an approach to increase family safety to reduce family separation.
Overall, the FRAPS project aimed to benefit:
- 2,230 street-connected children via outreach, 700 children via centres, and supporting approximately 612 to move into family-based care with adequate follow up and support.
- 2,400 caregivers via self-help groups (SHGs), benefitting 10,200 children in their care.
- 2,600 community members and 2,200 children in the same communities, via participation in child protection awareness raising activities in schools and community forums.
- District officials and other key stakeholders to promote learning and to strengthen approaches to child protection and preventing family separation.
The end of project evaluation aimed to synthesise the wealth of data and learnings captured over the life of the project to determine if project objectives were met, to complement existing data with primary data collection related to final project outcomes, and to provide a final product that can be used to appreciate the project achievements, challenges and learnings and to guide future programming.
Thirty-eight project documents were reviewed, and primary data was collected (via key informant interviews, group interviews, and focus group discussions) from 233 project stakeholders, including 91 adult beneficiaries, 103 child beneficiaries, 8 government stakeholders and 31 FRAPS project staff.
Information from all sources was triangulated for analysis of the relevance, effectiveness, sustainability, economy and efficiency of the project.
Findings from the evaluation should be interpreted in light of the following evaluation limitations: some missing project documentation including datasets, potential selection bias of respondents during primary data collection, geographically distant reintegration families excluded from primary data collection, data collectors did not verify beneficiary registers against hard copy case files.
Findings revealed that the project was relevant at all levels, that progress was made across the project’s four objectives and that several positive unintended outcomes were also achieved.
