Save the children

The Global Mental Health research group at Centre for International Health has established a collaboration with Save the children Finland. The research group members involved are: Professor Ingunn Marie S. Engebretsen, Psychologist PhD Ane-Marthe Solhiem Skar and psychologist Patrick O’Loughlin.

CSSP is defined as child-focused or family-based social programs that directly or indirectly address children’s needs and rights through a combination of social protection and complementary interventions; and which improve child development as well as ensuring that all social protection is child-sensitive, by maximizing impacts and minimizing harms on children, girls and boys alike.

Parenting is the processes of promoting and supporting the development of a child. The international Child Development Programme, ICDP, is a parenting programme with a fixed curriculum and procedures focusing in particular on parenting that is adapted to the local context, it includes multiple group meetings and also home visits. ICDP is thus one of many components in a wider CSSP framework. ICDP originated from prior work where also University of Bergen was involved.

Save the children Finland has supported national Save the Children Offices to develop projects referred to as Child Sensitive Social Protection (CSSP) in a range of countries together with the local Save the Children offices. Based on the understanding that complementary interventions to social protection will ensure better results on child development outcomes, a crucial part of CSSP was to promote improved care and investment in children among parents and other caregivers. Save the Children was therefore introducing parenting programmes as an integral part of the CSSP initiatives.

The Global Mental Health research group is involved (2018) in four countries where Save the children Finland in agreement with the respective Save the children offices and respective ministries implement joint parenting-CSSP projects. The countries are India, Nepal, Phlippines and Somaliland. The Centre for International Health has been particularly engaged in the Philippines. The CSSP in the Philippines chose ICDP , International Child Development Programme, as a framework for their parenting sessions. Ormoc, Leyte was their chosen intervention pilot site. The CSSP in Ormoc embrace community engagement, home-visits, nutrition counselling, family budgeting, life skills and a variety of other activities.

The role of the Global Mental Health research group was to assess the piloting of the parenting package in CSSP involving ICDP in the four countries India, Nepal, Phlippines and Somaliland using qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Given a successful pilot of the program the ambition is to expand the implementation of ICDP further.

REK reference number: Ref. nr.:2017/2421