Jewelers for Children and De Beers

Partnership to Help Children in South Africa.

Jewelers for Children, in partnership with the De Beers Companies, co-funded a program in the previously disadvantaged townships surrounding Galeshewe in the province of the Northern Cape of South Africa.

South Africa currently has space for 100,000 children in institutional care. As a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in 2005 there were already approximately 1 million orphans under the age of 15 and by 2010 this number could rise to between 3 and 4 million. Clearly the system is not going to be able to cope with these alarming numbers of children. Furthermore it is estimated that the cost of caring for these children in an institution would require a 10-fold increase in social welfare costs to sustain the growing numbers of orphans through more traditional means. This is a burden which is not sustainable within the current systems.

Sadly child headed households are a reality in South Africa (older children looking after younger siblings in their parental homes.) Many organizations are starting to work in this arena, but none have the depth of experience and knowledge in the field that the National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) has. The NACCW have developed an approach called the Isibindi Model, which has been piloted in a number of sites across South Africa.
The program consists of three main elements. Firstly the NACCW carefully selects a number of individuals from the community to be trained in child-care and only the best of this group are ultimately selected as the care givers in the program. These care givers identify the child headed households in their community and draw along side the families to provide them with the support they require on a daily basis. This includes support for their physical needs, educational needs, but very importantly also their psychosocial needs – providing the leadership and guidance they will require to manage their situations effectively.

The second main element is that the program is centered around a physical structure to which the children go on a daily basis for nutritional, educational, and life skills training and simply social interaction and support.
The third and very important element is that drop out rates are high in volunteer programs and this is avoided in the Isibindi Model by paying the volunteers a monthly stipend. Government have thus agreed to pay these stipends on a long-term basis - something which otherwise would be very burdensome for private donors to bear.

JFC and De Beers each contributed $ 265,000 to the multi-year effort and reports over the past six months show substantial progress in the start-up of the program. As the program progresses, we will provide periodic updates on the number of child-headed households receiving assistance and the success rate of the program.

The Isibindi model, a community-based child and youth care model, has been successfully implemented in six impoverished and marginalizes areas of Galeshewe-Kimberley, Northern Cape: Donkerhoek; Soul City; Lerato Park; Greenpoint; Platfontein One and Platfontein Two. The Isibindi project was introduced to Donkerhoek in 2003 and rolled-out to the other areas over the next five years.

The National Association of Child and Youth Care Workers (NACCW) is the initiator and ‘owner’ of the Isibindi model which has been implemented in these areas in partnership with two implementing agencies, Child Welfare SA: Kimberley and ACVV; the provincial Department of Social Services and Population Development (DSSPD) which funds the core project costs at each site; the corporate funders – De Beer and US-based charity,Jewelers for Children, who fund training, professional support, capacity building and mentorship services; and the six communities served.  These partners serve on the Isibindi Steering Committee which aims to promote an organized child cent red response in Galeshewe-Kimberley. The commitment and active involvement of key institutional partners on the Steering Committee was instrumental to the successful roll-out of these six projects.

In June 2008 there were 61 child and youth care workers (CCWs) employed in six Isibindi sites. These CCWs live in the communities they serve and for most of them this is their first formal employment opportunity.  All the CCWs were receiving training in the 14 module accredited Certificate in Child and Youth Care Work and a range of short courses.  Training is done on a monthly basis over a period of 2 – 3 years and is intended to equip CCWs to provide quality child and youth care services as well as placing them on a professional child and youth care path.

The main challenge encountered in the process of establishing some Isibindi projects was difficulty in securing the required number of CCWs for each site. This was attributed to the fact that the areas chosen by the DSSPD for Isibindi projects were exceptionally difficult to offer services in with high levels of unemployment, apathy and political volatility.

While Isibindi CCWs showed high levels of commitment to the project, over the years a number of them left primarily because of the low salary offered and the more lucrative packages offered by institutional or residential child and youth care facilities or in the public sector.  The low level of CCWs salaries was identified as the main threat to the retention of their services in the Isibindi projects. Having invested a substantial amount of time and money in training and capacitating CCWs to function at an optimal level, it is important to find ways to retain the services of these workers in the projects for as long as possible.

Each Isibindi site provides a range of care and support services to meet the physical, material, educational and psycho-social needs of children and their families. Services have been provided to 1124 vulnerable children under-18 years since January 2007. Feedback from community stakeholders reflected very positively on the way in which services were provided and the impact of these services in communities.

In the Donkerhoek site, with funding from the De Beer Fund, a Child Care Centre was built to provide a flagship for child and youth care service provision. While a positive development in most respects, the issue of who owns the building has created challenges for the partnership arrangement and has created unrealistic expectations in the other communities about what is needed for a successful Isibindi project. Containers for storing equipment and some kind of enclosure to provide protection from the elements are necessary for Safe Parks, but a brick and mortar building is not an essential requirement for providing community-based services.

Three pressing service delivery related constraints were identified: Safe Park facilities – with the exception of Donkerhoek, none of the sites have a formally enclosed Safe Park area and are using open spaces in their communities, or the backyards of CCWs homes, to provide after school sporting and cultural activities and holiday programmes.; resources for holiday programmes, and the lack of social service resources in communities served, particularly alcohol and drug prevention and treatment services and family counseling services.  

One of the strengths of the Isibindi model is its standardized approaches to initiating and implementing Isibindi projects including minimum standards for Isibindi services, human resource management practices and monitoring and quality assurance mechanisms. The Isibindi mentors, experienced child and youth care workers employed by NACCW, play a pivotal role in ensuring the integrity of the Isibindi model in all sites. Two locally based Isibindi mentors provide these mentorship services and are also responsible for the roll-out of Isibindi projects to other areas of the Northern Cape. There is limited local capacity in providing developmental child and youth care services and some attention needs to be paid to building the capacity of the implementing agencies so they can take on some mentorship responsibilities.

The Isibindi model is recognized by the DSSPD as best practice in meeting the needs of children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV & AIDS in the Northern Cape. The model gives effect to South Africa’s developmental social welfare policy and legislative principles, specifically those found in the Children’s Act of 2005, including a focus on prevention and early intervention, family preservation, community development, and a child’s rights framework.