An Early Years Support Centre service in Dushanbe: Reducing poverty, empowering vulnerable families, strengthening partnerships and advocating for rights.
Location: Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Duration: 24 months
This project builds on an existing project "Better care for at-risk Babies" which began in 2006 and is delivered through a partnership between the state, local and international NGOs. The resulting Day Care Centre for children with disabilities and their families, Kishte, started work in February 2008. Kishte provides a safe place in a stimulating environment for over 80 vulnerable children from the community and the Baby Home.
The new Early Years Support Centre (EYSC) will augment the day care work at Kishte and has the overall objective reducing the number of children at risk of poverty in Dushanbe. The EYSC will support vulnerable young children and families to reduce the risk of social exclusion and increase their capacity to thrive. We will work to achieve this objective by training mothers to become financially active; providing crisis support and short term accommodation for women and children at risk; providing counselling and support to parents and awareness training for local administrators; and training of professionals in child care and early intervention.
Expectations:
We expect that the Early Years Support Service will enable mothers better to combine earning a living with caring for a child with additional needs. With greater financial independence and better childcare skills, mothers will face fewer pressures from their families and wider society to abandon their children. Our work directly with the baby home staff members will bring about a shift in the balance of their work away from institutional containment in a baby home. The health and social care professionals trained through this project will become more skilled in best practices of childcare and family support. Government administrators will become more aware of the needs of vulnerable children and their parents and will respect children's rights in the decisions they make and in the nature of their partnerships with civil society. An extended evaluation of this project will serve as a model to guide future early years support projects in Central Asia.
