Brief history of Jukumu Letu Organization
Pre-school orphans and vulnerable children are likely to suffer significant developmental, emotional and behavioral problems as a result of limited nurturing resulting in long term destabilization of societies mostly affected by HIV/AIDS pandemic. To date much of the psycho-social focus on orphans and vulnerable children has been geared towards older chil
dren. Little specific attention has been paid to support needs of OVC’s in their early years. In this light the Jukumu Letu Day Care and kindergarten targets children from the Mathare slum in Ngong town of Kajiado district. The primary objective of the centre is to provide a safe and secure location for young children to be cared for while their care-giver or older siblings attend school or work. The centre also promotes a holistic development of pre-school children. The main goal of the centre is to improve the psychosocial, physical health and development of young OVC’s ( from birth to 6/7 years) through the facilitation of a holistic package of evidence based intervention provided within the children’s centre. The centre works within the following objectives as its core and focus;
i) To improve the development status of pre-school children who are orphans or vulnerable. Development is defined broadly to include the physical, cognitive and socio emotional domains
ii) To develop the capacity of volunteers to effectively address cognitive, socio emotional and basic health and nutrition needs of OVC’s using affordable locally available materials. iii) To develop a replicable cost effective minimum package of culturally sensitive intervention that is supported by scientific evidence. iv) To identify and develop key policy and advocacy message to be delivered to the government and the community related to child protection, children’s rights and resource allocation to support early childhood development for OVC’s. v) To facilitate capacity building for parents, foster parents, guardians and care givers with regards to improving parenting and child care including recognition of signs of child abuse and prevention. vi) To empower the community to manage and sustain income generating activities to enable the community cope with the needs of OVC’s. Activities
The program targets OVC’s from birth to 6 years through the day care and kindergarten centre. Jukumu Letu strives to facilitate processes aimed at creating and designing coping mechanisms by the community for the care of the increasing number of young OVC’s. To accomplish this, the programs activities include:
• Provision of at least one nutritious meal
• Assurance of up to date immunizations and growth monitoring.
• Recognition of and treatment for common childhood illness in cooperation with local available services and and government health institution.
• Community empowerment activities designed to use local structures to identify and address challenges that threaten the development of their children, particularly those made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.
• Use of a comprehensive for the centre curriculum for the centre that includes cognitive and psychosocial development components.
• Training of the centre staff on the curriculum enabling them to implement the intervention.
• Training of both the child-care staff and care-givers on a variety of topics like parenting, nutrition etc.
• Home visits to reduce isolation of care-givers, increase their conduct with the larger social network, reduce discrimination, and ensure that knowledge and techniques to improve early childhood development are being successfully implemented beyond the centre.
• Facilitating educational sessions and campaigns for community leaders and policy makers that address children’s rights and stigma experienced by OVC’s.
• Development of linkages between the centre and local government authorities. Location
Jukumu Letu has two centres one in Ngong town and another in western Kenya, herein referred to as Jukumu Ngong and Jukumu Bunyore respectively. Jukumu Ngong is situated along Main Flow Academy road behind Green Yard opposite Kobil petrol station in Ngong town a few kilometers from Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. Centre support
To realize its goals the centre relies on well wishers, friends and sale of crafts. Your kind support will help jukumu realize its goal of providing the basic needs like food, psychosocial needs for the children. We welcome any form of support and encourage volunteers to participate in the program. Achievements/challenges
So far the centre has been able to reach out to more than 330 children compared to less than 200 a year ago. The centre has been offering daycare services and ECD for all the years it has been in existence but at the start of this year (2012) we deemed it fit to start a class one program to accommodate pupils who move from KG3and so far the class has fifteen pupils. Jukumu runs empowerment programs for women and youth drawn from the community. Knitting club, sandal production and bead work are some of the programs run in the centre. The proceeds of these programs are used for the advancement of the centre and the community at large. In conjunction with partners like Karibu Afrika, jukumu has started an empowerment program in which women are taken through tailoring courses. Capacity building programs for the staff on child growth and development are arranged on a quarter year basis. This ensures that the team at jukumu remains in a position to run the centre and ensure the achievement of its set objectives. There is involvement of parents and the community at large in the day to day running of the organization e.g. We normally celebrate birthdays as a group i.e the children born in the same month will have one party and hence the birthday celebrations are done monthly
The centre provides three meals in a day to enable the children to have good health and participate actively in the day to day activities of the centre.
