Africa-Press – Botswana. A Childline Botswana employee has underscored the need for children to live a safe place for them to realize their potential. Speaking during Childline Botswana’s stakeholder engagement workshop in Serowe recently, social worker, Ms Onkatlile Nthutang, said some children found themselves congested at welfare institutions, a situation that she called for the implementation of foster care as a short term intervention measure.
She said a safe and stable environment as well as a proper and caring family setup were fundamental to every stage of a child development.
Ms Nthutang said the workshop was meant to share information and experiences on child protection issues in relation to alternative care, to reflect on roles of stakeholders on foster care as well as to develop implementation plan on foster care programme for the district.
Another Childline Botswana social worker, Ms Seitebatso Kegakilwe, said foster care had the ability to unite stakeholders and enable them to understand the programme so as to devise best strategies that could counteract ill-treatment of children.
“Foster care is used to provide temporary care and often children will return home once the problems that caused them to go into foster care have been resolved and when it is clear that their parents are able to look after them safely,” she noted.
Ms Kegakilwe shared that foster care was not new to Botswana, saying it was officially launched in 2007 through a collaboration between Childline Botswana and Department of Social Protection.
Therefore, she said, over the years there had been progress in implementing the programme and thus far 11 and 45 children had been placed in foster homes in Tutume and Kweneng districts respectively.
However, Ms Kegakilwe decried the fact that the foster care programme was faced with challenges of funding especially that most of the foster parents were not employed and social workers were also overstretched.
Although that was the case, Ms Kegakilwe stressed that foster care was a viable undertaking.
When giving an update on the child welfare cases in the area, social worker at Sekgoma Memorial Hospital, Mr Maikutlo Ramaselwana, said they had a total of 2 394 children registered under the social and community development programme.
Of that number, 967 were orphans while 1 251 were needy pupils whereas the remaining 176 were children in need of protection.
Mr Ramaselwana said they experienced high numbers of children affected by social ills such as defilement, negligence, child abuse and rape.
“We are faced with challenges of low number of social welfare officers, high number of cases involving children and high number of children who are abusing drugs” he said.
Mr Ramaselwana said they addressed these challenges by organizing retreats for juvenile delinquents, disposing some cases affecting children at courts and providing psychological support to victims.
Mr Ramaselwana there was need to organize mass campaigns to teach the community about the Children’s Act and training of the Village Child Protection Committees (VCPC).
However, attendees raised concerns of rigidity in dealing with cases affecting children.
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