The Council of Churches in Zambia (CCZ), SDG Innovation Challenge Winner, in partnership with the SDG Philanthropy Platform officially launched a Children Welfare Hubs project which will be implemented in Lusaka Province.
The project will be hosted by CCZ members churches namely United Church of Zambia-Mount Olive in Chongwe, Reformed Church of Zambia in Chawama, Reformed Church of Zambia in Libala and Salvation Army in George compound with an objective of building bridges to foster children social welfare and health services in Lusaka.
The project aims to establish a Church and Community Children’s Welfare Hubs which would act as facilitating units to monitor and promote basic child services and to create and enhance linkages of the community to main service providers of health, social welfare, and child protection.
In his speech, Maybin Nsupila, SDG Philanthropy Platform National Coordinator for Zambia highlighted that CCZ's innovation was selected along with 2 other faith-based organization (FBO) out of more than 130 submissions.
"This is a testimony of the presence of the FBO's in communities and the good work they are doing in uplifting the livelihoods of the people in general, and children, in particular," he added.
Rev Dr Alfred Kalembo, CCZ President, said that the widespread failure to protect children is a global crisis.
"Child protection remains a problem in Zambia because of inadequate legal protection and societal acceptance of these violations of children’s rights. Many children in Zambia live with physical abuse everyday disguised as discipline," he remarked.
This project is an innovative response to the challenge posed by SDGPP of finding solutions capable of real-time service tracking and response (availability, access, quality, delivery) for child services (health, education, social protection etc) at the community level in Zambia.
In the coming months, young volunteers will be trained with the help of the experts on how to track, monitor and promote utilization of child services within the jurisdiction of the host churches.
CCZ and its partners are looking forward to seeing the impact that will result of this initiative. The innovation has a very high potential for scaling up and in attracting more partners to be on-board. For more information on how to join as a volunteer, sign up to the project's group here.