Social Service Systems Strengthening

Ensuring that all components and key actors involved in child protection have the technical and operational capacity to carry out their functions in an integrated, holistic, coordinated manner that is geared towards long-term sustainability and accessibility.

Social Service Systems Strengthening

Ensuring that all components and key actors involved in child protection have the technical and operational capacity to carry out their functions in an integrated, holistic, coordinated manner that is geared towards long-term sustainability and accessibility.

Sector at a Glance

By the very nature of their vulnerability, vulnerable children are at greater risk for exploitation and abuse. To meet their needs, safeguard their access to essential services, and protect their rights requires a well-functioning support system that accounts for the challenges they face. Although networks of support are dedicated to providing quality care to vulnerable children, families, and communities, they often face barriers beyond their control. They may be underfinanced or lack essential job tools, including basic transportation; may receive inadequate on-the-job training and support; and often face an overwhelming caseload.

The systems strengthening approach is an evidence-driven process that identifies deficits, such as an underperforming workforce, insufficient financing, and inadequate child protection laws or policies. This approach builds on the existing capacity of individuals, organizations, and systems to strengthen those gaps.

A sustainable way to help fortify the very networks on which vulnerable households rely is to build good governance and help organizations define their core message; build their human resources, technical, coordination, financial management, and procurement capacities; develop well-functioning monitoring and evaluation systems; and link up with other systems. The systems strengthening approach ensures an evolving continuum of care and helps establish the necessary monitoring and resource strategies for delivering effective social services.

Every day, CRS and our partners carry out work that benefits vulnerable communities by expanding our global experience in capacity strengthening and our partnerships with government. Through a community-level accompaniment of mayors, to national programs implemented in partnership with ministries, to multinationally coordinated programs on complex policy approaches, CRS is there. Using a systems approach, we bolster the key pillars of existing social services systems: leadership and governance, workforce, financing, information and management systems, coordination and networking mechanisms, and service delivery. We facilitate linkages with communities to ensure their needs are prioritized. Faith-based organizations often provide services that fill gaps and support children, youth, and families, and serve remote or underserved communities beyond the reach of government services.

CRS capitalizes on our relationships with those faith-based networks. We help strengthen partnerships between community structures and public, private, and faith-based providers to ensure seamless integration of all providers into sustainable national systems. On the hyperlocal to national levels, CRS builds the capacity of public and private organizations by providing comprehensive training, supporting the existing workforce and helping to expand it, identifying and addressing—through an exhaustive data collection process —existing weaknesses in a system, and improving the legal and policy frameworks that directly affect vulnerable children. The CRS approach emphasizes the strengthening of child protection systems and services. We train partner staff, volunteers, and community-based child protection committees, police, and teachers, among others, to better understand children’s rights and how to connect children to needed resources.

Highlights of our work in Social Service Systems Strengthening

CRS country programs
Nigeria
Tanzania
Vietnam
Kenya
Case studies

Strengthening Existing Structures in Nigeria

Michael Stulman

Change often begins with the right data that identify gaps in and opportunities for maximizing resources. Data help organize institutions, prioritize services, and bring diverse parties toward a common goal.

In Nigeria, a $36 million, CRS-led consortium branded SMILE—funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID—worked closely with the State Ministry of Women and Social Affairs, or SMWSA, to conduct a series of rapid-situation assessments. The consortium collected data on vulnerable children and their caregivers in the states of Benue, Kogi, Edo, Nasarawa, and the Federal Capital Territory. That data, in addition to national ministry reports, state and national situation reports, and census data, are empowering local authorities and civil society organizations, or CSOs, to scale up access to care and support for roughly 500,000 vulnerable children and 125,000 caregivers by 2018.

To guarantee local ownership and long-term success, SMILE is working in tandem with the Nigerian government to decide service priorities and project locations. At briefing meetings led by SMWSA, SMILE used the analyzed data to rank priority services for vulnerable children and their families, and to determine, by consensus, which local government agencies to target for further support and capacity building.

About two-thirds of SMILE funds are being allocated to the locally registered CSOs in the form of subgrants for service provision to target beneficiaries based on identified strategies. From the local briefing meetings, SMILE received information that helped the consortium develop a detailed request for application that interested CSOs used to apply as subgrantees.

Grant recipients will receive continued training, technical expertise, and oversight aimed at strengthening their institutional capacity throughout the duration of the project and beyond. This robust investment in human resources and capacity building will provide sustainable social services structures to vulnerable children and their caregivers.

Strengthening Existing Structures in Nigeria

Change often begins with the right data that identify gaps in and opportunities for maximizing resources. Data help organize institutions, prioritize services, and bring diverse parties toward a common goal.

Read more

Strengthening Indigenous NGOs

Sara A. Fajardo

At age 16, Erick Omondi Okoth became a CRS beneficiary of The Children Behind Project in western Kenya. He had lost his parents and all but one of his uncles. As the eldest child in the family, he was responsible for 15 siblings and cousins. He received assistance from CRS partners in the form of seeds and agricultural training, nutritional and emotional support, school fees, medical care, and vocational and entrepreneurship training.

Once the family was in a better position to fend for itself, Erick felt called to assist other vulnerable children. He pooled his money with other community members and eventually founded his own local nongovernmental organization, or NGO: the Blue Cross Nyatike Development Program that now serves more than 5,000 vulnerable children and their households.

CRS has helped Erick and Blue Cross become a responsive grassroots NGO with well-articulated vision and mission statements. With staff training and CRS guidance, Blue Cross has developed human resources tools for building staff skills and retaining well-performing employees. Such guidance has paid off: Now a well-operating NGO, Blue Cross has put into place mechanisms for program management and design, monitoring and evaluation, and a responsive board of directors with a coherent strategic. Subsequently, the organization has been able to apply for USAID and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, subgrants so that it can continue to meet the needs of the most vulnerable populations in its community.

Erick is an example of how giving one person a hand up can lead to transformational change on a broader scale. By investing first in Erick and then, later, in Blue Cross, CRS increased its effect beyond one vulnerable child to more than 5,000 vulnerable children. We are now replicating this approach across programs and countries.

Strengthening Indigenous NGOs

Erick is an example of how giving one person a hand up can lead to transformational change on a broader scale. By investing first in Erick and then, later, in Blue Cross, CRS increased its effect beyond one vulnerable child to more than 5,000 vulnerable children. We are now replicating this approach across programs and countries.

Read more

Building Adequate Financing for Kenyan NGOs

Debbie DeVoe

CRS helped transform an investment of $8,268 into more than $1.72 million in awards to 15 partner organizations in Kenya—nearly triple what those partners had won before receiving CRS support.

Sustained outreach to vulnerable households relies on the continued financial health of the organizations that serve them. Many indigenous NGOs, though, lack clearly articulated goals and policies for grant management, as well as effective financial systems—all fundamentals for long-term growth and success.

Through the Support and Assistance to Indigenous Implementing Agencies, or SAIDIA, project in Kenya, CRS invested a total of $45,000 in a series of workshops conducted to help our local partners build stronger human resources systems, comprehensive strategic plans, and resources management, including proposal development. At project inception, five of the organizations had not completed drafts of their strategic plans, and four lacked written plans altogether.

Following the workshops, CRS conducted monitoring visits to verify quality project implementation, review project documents, and hold regular discussions about project progress. The CRS-provided routine monitoring and guidance helped solidify the lessons learned in the training workshops and ensure that organizations had systems in place so they would be competitive grant recipients.

The modest investment of a little more than $8,000 in the proposal writing workshop led to a 90% increase in proposal submissions—a clear signal that partners were more comfortable with the proposal submission process and their ability to win funding. Building the financial health and overall performance of local organizations does not need to be a costly endeavor, but it does require in-depth understanding of existing gaps and the provision of tools that local organizations can use to identify and remedy shortcomings.

Building Adequate Financing for Kenyan NGOs

CRS helped transform an investment of $8,268 into more than $1.72 million in awards to 15 partner organizations in Kenya—nearly triple what those partners had won before receiving CRS support.

Read more

Coordinating Existing Services to Build a Network for Children in Vietnam

Debbie DeVoe

Services for 275 children infected with and affected by HIV in Ho Chi Minh City have been streamlined, thanks to the formation of a network of service providers. Although well-functioning health, education, and social services existed, poor coordination coupled with HIV stigma and low awareness of how to get assistance meant some children were left out of the system while others received double services.

With funding from USAID and Private Agencies Collaborating Together, Inc., or PACT, CRS teamed up with the Department of Labor—Invalids and Social Affairs, or DOLISA, to view the needs of a child with or affected by HIV from the perspective of the local health, legal, and education and training departments. Most of the participants were unfamiliar with concepts of service coordination and case management. Furthermore, they lacked experience working in a cooperative network.

With CRS training and guidance, these departments developed a menu of core interventions, defined which agency could provide a service within the network, and established a DOLISA-headed coordination board to oversee the process. CRS worked with DOLISA to set up the referral system among these key service providers, develop the monitoring system tools and software, and identify volunteer ward workers—who routinely visit the children in their homes and serve as direct links between DOLISA and the service providers—in the community.

Each ward worker assesses a child’s needs—vital information used to develop a service delivery plan that prioritizes basic needs and defines the network member equipped to meet them. When service is provided, the referred agency completes and returns a form to DOLISA. Follow-up ward worker visits ensure that clients are using the assistance offered through the network. As a result, the number of children receiving services has increased from 17 to 275.

Coordinating Existing Services to Build a Network for Children in Vietnam

Services for 275 children infected with and affected by HIV in Ho Chi Minh City have been streamlined, thanks to the formation of a network of service providers. Although well-functioning health, education, and social services existed, poor coordination coupled with HIV stigma and low awareness of how to get assistance meant some children were left out of the system while others received double services.

Read more

Scaling Up Quality Pediatric HIV Testing and Counseling in Tanzania

Philip Laubner

As of 2013, 3.2 million children worldwide were living with HIV. Undiagnosed pediatric HIV can lead to a suite of complications, including increased susceptibility to childhood bacterial infections, wasting, failure to reach typical milestones, and death.

In Tanzania, the majority of pediatric AIDS cases are not detected until the syndrome has reached advanced stages, thus leading to high mortality and morbidity rates. Two challenges to reducing pediatric HIV infection rates identified by the Tanzanian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare are low levels of early infant identification and provider-initiated testing and counseling, or PITC. CRS is working with the government to reverse this trend by scaling up pediatric services in rural communities through the CDC-funded Local Partners Excel in Comprehensive HIV & AIDS Service Delivery, or LEAD, program.

With LEAD support, the Pangani Health Clinic in the Tanga region took their low uptake of pediatric PITC as a ward challenge. The clinic introduced a mentorship program to strengthen PITC documentation at pediatric entry points and ensure linkage to care and treatment clinics. The clinic also instituted daily monitoring of PITC activities and selected staff to be responsible for documenting and reporting on the findings. To ensure a consistent supply of testing materials, the clinic assessed the availability of test kits and plans for procurement. Clinic staff reviewed data and findings at regular meetings and used those data to identify gaps in quality care provision.

As a result of this program, the rate of PITC increased from 13% (during the period from January to April 2014) to 75%, when the intervention was put in place later in the year (from May to September). Children identified as HIV-positive have been linked to clinic- or home-based support—a vital step to helping children get the care they need to manage the virus.

Scaling Up Quality Pediatric HIV Testing and Counseling in Tanzania

As of 2013, 3.2 million children worldwide were living with HIV. Undiagnosed pediatric HIV can lead to a suite of complications, including increased susceptibility to childhood bacterial infections, wasting, failure to reach typical milestones, and death.

Read more

Building Effective Information Management and Accountability Systems in Nigeria

Michael Stulman

When resources are limited, an organization must properly target beneficiaries and prioritize service delivery. Paper-based models for client-level monitoring is fraught with errors. Such models delay information sharing, often making analysis and dissemination impossible on a national level.

In Nigeria, where an estimated 17.5 million, or 24.5%, of Nigerian children are classified as vulnerable, data collection is required on a massive scale. To effectively manage the records of 231,000 vulnerable children and 65,000 caregivers as part of the $36 million, CRS-led consortium branded SMILE—funded by USAID—CRS has been adapting the National OVC [Orphans and Vulnerable Children] Management Information System, a free, open source web application called NOMIS.

The system can be used offline, a critical feature when collecting data in the field. Its built-in data quality checks reduce user error and help guarantee quality information that can be exported to PDF and Excel.

To date, all 42 participating SMILE CSOs, five state ministries, and a couple of local government social welfare units have implemented NOMIS. SMILE provides them with regular on- and off-site system support and hardware maintenance.

Designed to generate age- and sex-disaggregated service statistics, organizations can tailor NOMIS to produce custom reports on child well-being issues, including civic and birth registration, access to education and health care, and access to HIV care and nutrition services.

NOMIS users have reported being able to provide more targeted and effective programming. “Before NOMIS, we used to select our training beneficiaries at random, but NOMIS has helped us to select our beneficiaries based on need,” says a spokesperson for the Center for Women, Youth, and Community Action, a SMILE-supported CSO. After finding a gender disparity based on NOMIS indicators, this CSO used those data to sensitize the local community to the importance of educating girls.

Building Effective Information Management and Accountability Systems in Nigeria

NOMIS users have reported being able to provide more targeted and effective programming. “Before NOMIS, we used to select our training beneficiaries at random, but NOMIS has helped us to select our beneficiaries based on need,” says a spokesperson for the Center for Women, Youth, and Community Action, a SMILE-supported CSO. After finding a gender disparity based on NOMIS indicators, this CSO used those data to sensitize the local community to the importance of educating girls.

Read more