Building capacity for advancing child protection in Mali

UNICEF is the UN worldwide agency committed to promote children’s rights across countries. Such a mandate is particularly significant in African countries like Mali where children under the age of 18 make up 50% of the population and who experience widespread violation of rights. In 2011, when I was chief child protection in this country with a role to manage UNICEF’s interventions and human resources charged to protect children against various forms of violation of their rights, I embarked on research aiming to investigate conflicts experienced by Child Protection Workers (CPWs) related to their personal beliefs/practices and professional agenda. The methodology of the research was action oriented in line with my intention to put this work at the service of CPWs in Mali and beyond to improve their practice. I worked together with them to explore various dimensions of cultural conflicts and what it takes to manage it effectively in the context of Mali.
The Key findings could be summarised as follows:
- CPWs are involved in various forms of violation of children’s right: Violence, Child Labour, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C)…
- The cultural conflict experienced by CPWs is among challenges that limit the programme from achieving better results. It also impacts negatively on the workers through lack of job satisfaction, low self-esteem and health problems due to the clash experienced between UNICEF expectations and local community values.
- Socio economic determinants interrelate with strategies in the management of cultural and practice mismatches experienced by CPWs.
The analysis of CPWs’ positioning through what I call ‘Triangle Model’ provides insights into various types of CPWs encountered in respect of the distance separating them from their professional values/agenda. Answers to questions raised by the triangle model is likely to help guide policies and strategies to build the capacities of CPWs and to support them to adjust to their professional agenda. This project also demonstrates that to face cultural discrepancies, stakeholders will need to go one step beyond ‘ordinary’ strategies to experiment with more contextualized initiatives. Recognition of inherent power in workers and communities should be seen as part of any theory of capacity building itself based on the framework of social constructionism.