The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) has launched a Child Protection Toolkit and system to facilitate community and online sensitization and awareness creation, and enhance integrated social services delivery in Ghana.
These form part of the implementation of the Social Services Initiative to strengthen inter-sectoral collaboration at the decentralized and national levels.
The toolkit include the Social Services Directory (SSD) website, Inter-sectoral Standard Operating Procedure (ISSOP) manual and the Social Welfare Information Management System (SWIMS), which will equip Social workers and social service providers to render quality services.
In a keynote address delivered on her behalf by Dr. Afisah Zakaria, Chief Director of the Ministry, the sector Minister, Hon. Sarah Adwoa Safo, stated that continuous implementation of the programme of cooperation on Child and Social Protection led to the development of the SSD, ISSOP and the SWIMS domain in collaboration with Office of the Head of Local Government Service, Ministry of Local Government Decentralization and Rural Development with funding from UNICEF.
She said, “The MoGCSP in March 2020 led the customization of the “Primero” software to the Ghanaian contexts, needs and Standard Operating Procedures. SWIMS is a case management information management system used to facilitate information sharing, referrals, monitoring and reporting between various actors and levels of governance.”
“SWIMS adopted a software called “Primero” which was developed by UNICEF, the Primero software has a lot of default features, standard forms, access controls, geographical, naming conventions and reporting dashboards.”
Ghana, according to the Minister, is the first country globally to run the software’s latest version which is “Primero X” and urged all social welfare and community development officers as well as partners to adopt and use these tools for the management of cases, family reunification, alternative Care, information-sharing, Incident Monitoring and reporting.
“These will help address multi-dimensional poverty and vulnerability, with a strong focus on promoting linkages between health, child protection, sexual and gender-based violence, and social protection services, referral and standard procedures for domestic based violence, Teen Pregnancy and child marriage, children in conflict with the law/ Juvenile Justice, children outside of parental or relative care and abandonment, child labour and trafficking, child maintenance and custody and finally, to the key social services for LEAP households and other vulnerable families,” she added.
In a solidarity message, the Minister of Local Government, Decentralization and Rural Development observed that one of the primary objectives of the decentralized system is to make all services including social services responsive and accessible at the local level.
In a statement read on his behalf, Hon. Daniel Kwaku Botwe noted it is important to therefore strengthen the capacity, coordination and systems at both national and local levels for sustainability of the Integrated Social Services delivery.
The Ministry, he said, has high interest in the programme and all other interventions related to the welfare of children and will continue to support Child Protection Programmes by providing the necessary resources and technical backstopping to the MMDAs to deliver their mandates.
Dr. Nana Ato Arthur, Head of the Local Government Service remarked that the programmes and other related ones are gradually transforming service delivery in the country.
The system, he said, lends itself for the data of a client to be stored and retrieved as and when necessary, which permits the smooth case management by officers irrespective of who started a particular case and who closes it.
He stated that such a scenario creates a sense of continuity of case management as one social worker is not tied to a particular case and thereby creating indispensability situation as prevailed in the past.
Nana Arthur disclosed that currently 60 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) have been trained to use the SWIMS with plans far advanced to train 40 more to be hooked to the system to take the total beneficiary Assemblies to 100 by the end of 2021.
UNICEf Ghana Representative, Ms. Anne-Claire Dufae, urged the government to continue to allocate domestic resources in the budget for the implementation of these activities to augment support of the US and UK governments.
She noted that these tools have become even more relevant today considering the fact that Ghana and the whole world is struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic with children affected because schools were shut down for several months.
She stressed the need to keep hope alive and strive to do better and indicated that Ghanaian children are looking to the earlier generation to pave the way for their rights and dreams to be realized.
Sources: MyPublisher24.com