By Fahim Ahmed Ansari | Project Leader
Over the years we have faced many challenges that have eventually helped in building resilience and reinstating our confidence in our ecosystem to be the enablers in continuing the work on child protection. The first quarter of the financial year 2021-22 began with hope, determination and persistence; some of the many values Arpan believes in.
Personal Safety Education
Arpan's Personal Safety Education Programme (PSE) empowers children to identify safe and unsafe situations, teaches them the skills to assertively refuse and get away from incidents of sexual abuse and seek help from a helping adult. In an endeavour to create a safe environment for children, Arpan works with adult caregivers enabling them to understand and recognise Child Sexual Abuse and respond effectively. While this quarter saw a relaxation of restrictions on the lockdown throughout the nation, schools still remained closed. However, through our PSE programme, we were able to reach out to over 1,600 children and adults this quarter. We also provided psychotherapy to 109 children who disclosed after the Personal Safety education programme.
Training and Advocacy
Arpan focuses on building professional capacity for child protection by conducting training and capacity building initiatives with NGO professionals, Social Workers, Teachers, Institutional staff, Health professionals, Mental Health professionals, Government duty bearers and Corporates. In this quarter, through our training and capacity building initiative, we were able to train over 3,300 individuals. We also conducted a handholding session for the staff members of Muktangan, where we supported them to conduct Personal Safety Education sessions by helping them prepare for it and observing their session after we have already trained them. We facilitated mixed group training, where individuals from diverse organizations attend the training, consecutively for 3 months. We also implemented refresher training that are designed for participants who have attended Arpan's training in the past.
We advocate for robust child protection mechanisms at the systemic level by working on a collaborative model with government bodies. In the first quarter of 2020-21, through our advocacy at the national level, we trained 200 adolescent health counsellors under the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (National Adolescent Health Programme) that was launched by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW). We also conducted training sessions with 55 state resource persons under the Ayushman Bharat Programme (a joint initiative of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and Ministry of Education (MoE)). At the state level, we conducted online training sessions for 1,950 teachers from grades 1 to 8 of the Akola Zilla Parishad. We also conducted a live youtube session for Virat Hindustan Sangam, Bihar Chapter; an online platform initiated by Dr Subramanian Swamy, Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha.
Digital Learning
Interactive e-Learning solutions have time and again proved to be an easy and efficient learning tool to transcend geographical boundaries and scale Personal Safety Education programme. Arpan's E-learn platform is a great place for children to learn about Personal Safety and adults can acquire awareness about Child Sexual Abuse prevention and intervention. This quarter, over 18,000 users accessed Arpan's
Digital Learning resources. We are proud to announce that Arpan's Personal Safety Course for 8 to 10-year-olds and 11 to 13-year-olds is now being broadcasted on SWAYAM PRABHA, an initiative of the Ministry of Human Resources Development to provide 34 High-Quality Educational Channels through DTH (Direct to Home) across the length and breadth of the country on 24X7 basis.
Mental Health Services
It takes a lot of courage for the survivors of sexual abuse to take the first step towards healing. Arpan has been at the forefront of providing mental health support to the victims of Child Sexual Abuse to empower them to heal from its impact. In this quarter, we handled a total of 113 miscellaneous cases through 498 sessions with child clients, their trusted adults, and adult clients.
Public Awareness
With a vision of a world free from Child Sexual Abuse, Arpan creates awareness and sensitization through public advocacy and communication campaigns. In this quarter, Arpan achieved a copious overall reach of over 1.10 crores, out of which 1.05 crores was from Arpan's Social Media marketing. We hosted informative webinars and promoted Ketto Fundraiser campaign to support communities during the COVID-19 crisis. Through our strategic partnership with RobinAge, India's favourite newspaper for children, we garnered a reach of over 95,000. We also conducted awareness session with parents of students registered with Lido Learning, an ed-tech company revolutionizing formal classroom education through a unique and immersive online classroom for every child in India.
COVID-19 Related Support
We provided humanitarian aid by distributing 3,551 ration kits during this period. And along with this, we continue to offer Mental Health counselling and therapeutic services to anyone facing anxiety, stress or loss of loved ones. We reached out to 90 individuals through our self-care programme and offered emotional stabilization to 43 individuals.
With your sustained support, we hope to continue working towards creating a world free from Child Sexual Abuse.
Please write to us at communications@arpan.org.in with your suggestions and feedback to make this newsletter better.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
