Uniting for Child Safety: Building a Safer Tomorrow Together

Coming Together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is
success.” -Henry Ford

Community- collaboration in child safeguarding acknowledges that everybody in the wider community is responsible for safeguarding children and raising awareness of safeguarding issues and knowing what to look for in order to identify signs that harm is occurring.

Bridge International Academies has incorporated community collaboration in its child safeguarding works and this has been achieved by Bridge being able to;

1. Establish a database of organizations working with children across all communities where Bridge serve.
2. The contact details of each partner & the importance of contacting them are provided and explained to the alleged victim’s parents/guardian by the Resolution Manager, after which the Schools Supervisor also follows up with the parents to ensure that the
partners have been contacted.
3. The database of this partners is categorized per proximity to a specific school and includes the nearest hospital that can provide a medical report for defilement, police station, gender officer, children's officer, local chief, ChildLine and counselling center.
4. This database has allowed for the schools’ community to refer cases related to child safeguarding to these organizations for support in training, intervention, guidance & counselling of the cases, allowing for all community leaders, government and other organization in the community to be made aware of the perpetrators behavior and the
case.

Other ways that Bridge International Academies has used Community Collaboration in its child safeguarding work.
1. Bridge International Academies has been working with like-minded organizations to engage, advocate and champion matters of child safeguarding through the Child Safeguarding Association of Kenya (CSAK) leveraging on the members unique experiences, networks and resources, to drive transformative change in the Kenyan Society.

2. Bridge International Academies Kenya in partnership with Young1ove A Botswana- based NGO Youth Impact (previously called Young1ove) Launched a ‘Bridge Cares’ campaign that was rolled across all Bridge Kenya schools in term 3 of the 2021-2022 academic year.

Following a sensitization effort, Grade 3-8 parents were sent a weekly SMS containing information pertaining to sexual health, which parents were encouraged to discuss with their children. The campaign lasted for 10 weeks and was followed by phone-based surveys to a sample of school leaders and parents to gather feedback on the programme. Findings revealed that parents were overwhelmingly supportive of the campaign.