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Registering Children in a Project

Projects need ways to decide which children are to be included within the scope of its activities. This will be affected by the type of activities in the project, the demands on its services and the resources available. This section covers these issues. Birth registration of children is covered elsewhere.

This is a key part of starting activities aimed at supporting orphans and other vulnerable children. Other important elements are community mobilisation and situation analysis. These elements are inter-linked. For example, situation analysis should be much more than a technical exercise. It forms a key part of community mobilisation, particularly if it uses participatory approaches. Key points about ways of registering children into a particular project are:

1. It is inappropriate to target services on the basis of cause of parental death, for example HIV/AIDS. This is impractical, unfair and risks increasing stigma and discrimination about HIV/AIDS.

2. Local communities should identify the most vulnerable children within their community. The reasons for selecting particular children should be clear to everyone. There should be ways of challenging choices, so that these decisions are accountable to the local community.

3. Some projects use scoring systems as a way of helping this process. Others feel that such systems are foreign to local communities and risk imposing outside views. Where they are used, the local community should have a say in designing and modifying them. They should be used as a way of strengthening the community's selection processes and not as an alternative to these.

4. Projects have devised a number of practical tools to assist with this process. These include records for individual children/families and records (often called registers) of the project as a whole.

Who should benefit from projects?

There is widespread agreement that projects should not focus on children simply because their parents have died of AIDS. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. It is simply not practical in most circumstances since cause of death is not known or not disclosed. Many people who die of AIDS in poor countries have not been tested. It may be inappropriate and insensitive to ask families about cause of death.

2. It is unfair to provide support only to children whose parents have died of AIDS. Children whose parents have died of other causes also need support. In addition, many children are vulnerable as a result of HIV/AIDS for reasons other than parental death, such as family/community impoverishment and parental illness.

3. Providing services only to children whose parents died of AIDS has been shown to increase stigma and discrimination, particularly when inappropriate terms, such as 'AIDS orphans' are used. There is also a risk of increasing stigma and discrimination if a project is closely linked to other HIV/AIDS activities, such as HIV prevention.

4. Children who are not orphaned may live in the same household as orphaned children. Extended family members who may take orphans in often have children of their own. These children are vulnerable too. Services should be provided to all children within the household, not just those who are orphans.

Community selection processes

Local communities are able to identify children within their communities who are most vulnerable. There is often a word in the local language that denotes such children. However, there may be problems with this, particularly where this choice leads to receiving external material resources. For example, community leaders may seek to ensure that their own children benefit or that certain sections of the community, such as members of a particular church, benefit more than others. However, communities are able to resolve these problems. Methods may include agreeing local criteria for registering children and making these known to everyone. For example, one project used the following criteria for identifying vulnerable children:

• children living on their own with no adult supervision or guidance
• children living with a terminally ill parent
• children in households where multiple families are looked after by someone over the age of 70
• children who are dirty or in rags
• children who have a withdrawn appearance
• families with a hut in poor state of repair
• families with no chickens, farm animals or crops
• families with no food in the hut and no sign of a recent fire for cooking.

Information collected through the situation analysis is useful here. It also helps to have a way of challenging and reviewing decisions to include/exclude particular children. Ideally, these should use existing community structures.

Some projects have tried to help this process by using "vulnerability scores". This is a way of giving a numerical value to a particular situation. However, such systems are foreign to local communities and risk imposing outside values and ways of doing things. Where they are used, communities should have a say in their design and weightings given to particular criteria. In addition, they should be used as a tool within the overall process of communities identifying their own most vulnerable children. They should not be used by an external organisation as a quick alternative to this.

Ways of identifying vulnerable children

Ideally, local communities should identify all vulnerable children within their community. They should review and update this regularly. However, vulnerable children may be identified by other services and in other ways. Examples include health facilities, schools, voluntary counselling and testing centres and home-based care programmes. Staff working in these settings need to understand the role they can play in this area and training in identifying vulnerable children.

Record-keeping

Projects have developed a number of written tools for documenting and reporting selection decisions. There are two common types of record:

• Records relating to an individual child or family: These document a variety of information about the child, often allowing the child or family to be identified. The project needs to have a way of storing such confidential information securely.
• Records relating to the project as a whole: The most common type is sometimes called a "priority register", containing details of the children included in or registered with the project. This might entitle them to receive project services, such as visits from a project volunteer or mentor.

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