Albania Roma community mediators tackling child protection issues

Project : TACT 1 Oct 2009 | protection systems

Tirana, Albania: “We want to bring a change to our community regarding child protection issues, but firstly we have to change our attitude towards them!” said Manjola, participant in a training for trainers on child protection. Terre des hommes Delegation in Albania and the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) organized several training of trainers for child protection-community mediators during the period July – September 2009,

This activitiy was within the framework of a project aiming to “Empowering the vulnerable communities in Albania: Support to the Implementation of the national strategy for improving Roma living conditions”.

A total of 20 child protection community mediators from Roma and (Balkanic) Egyptian communities from Tirana, Fier and Elbasan participated in the last of a series of trainings organized in Tirana. The objectives of these training sessions was to provide participants with knowledge on child protection issues as well as with skills and techniques on how to fight negative phenomena. More in details, the trainings were organized to help participants better understand the importance of human rights protection in general, and child’s right protection in particular (common understanding of problems and risks faced by vulnerable children including phenomena such as child labor, abuse, exploitation and trafficking and also, techniques on how to identify prevention and intervention actions to such risks, especially education opportunities, child protection in schools, awareness raising campaign for parents and relatives). Moreover, participants where equipped with knowledge on how to respond to the cases of child abuse.

During the evaluation workshop, participants shared with each other experiences and best practices achieved while they were working with their communities. Another participant, Fredi, emphasized that early marriages are a bad phenomenon for the Roma children and he was trying to sensitize his community members about its consequences for children’s future life. In general, the participants appreciated the training and expressed their will to better promote child rights protection and mobilize other community members to better address these issues at respective local structures. [VL]