GHR Foundation's Children in Families funding supports child protection interventions that strengthen families, respond to children without family care and drive further evidence of innovative approaches. ​In Uganda, GHR’s Sister Support initiative found Catholic sisters are well-positioned to realize the best possible outcomes for vulnerable children and children living outside of family care by combining the Catholic tradition of care with insights from contemporary research.

In 2016, with guidance and funding from GHR, the Association of Religious in Uganda formed Catholic Care for Children in Uganda (CCCU) to unify Catholic sisters championing reform. The organization has helped hundreds of Catholic leaders and administrators from care institutions understand new child protection legislation and embrace an alternative care framework.

This week, CCCU launched a comprehensive new child protection policy at the Association of Religious in Uganda’s annual meeting of religious institute Superiors. Formed by stakeholders including Superiors, administrators and Diocesan representatives, the policy is an important document required by law to provide guidance for work with vulnerable children. The new policy will now be disseminated to stakeholders for implementation.

Designed to protect children from abuse or neglect, the child protection policy outlines best practices for ensuring the safety of child for whom services are being provided. Training manuals on child protection are currently being distributed to congregations of Catholic sisters, staff members of care institutions, political leaders, parents and community members through radio messages, community dialogues and home visits. Members of the Association of Religious in Uganda plan to visit religious institutes and provide detailed in-person trainings.
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Recognizing the right of every child to life, dignity, development and protection, this new policy indicates a commitment by Catholic sisters in Uganda to minimizing risk, practicing accountability and maintaining a proactive approach in their efforts to provide family-like care for vulnerable children. To learn more about how Catholic sisters are joining the effort to provide stable, positive, long-term family or family-like environments for children, contact us.

GHR recently had the honor of hosting a group from Kenya, visiting through the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program with Global Minnesota. We shared our Inter-Religious Action initiative’s funding efforts in Kenya, and learned about the inspiring work being done by these exceptional community leaders to improve lives, build peace and counter violent extremism through youth engagement.
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GHR invests in long-term peace building efforts along the Kenyan coast through our collaboration with Catholic Relief Services, the Coast Interfaith Council of Clerics and the Malindi Catholic Diocese through a project called the Dialogue Action Project, an initiative aimed at eliminating child marriage and improving household income through community saving groups.
 
Our guests shared inspiring stories from their efforts to promote peace across religions in their communities. For example, after the 2015 terrorist attacks on Garrissa University in Kenya, Ayub Mohamud, a high school teacher in Nairobi, set up Teachers Against Violent Extremism. The organization is now an interfaith network of teachers across Kenya working to share ideas that incorporate peace, tolerance and bridge-building with students in and outside classroom. In 2016, Mahamud was nominated for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize for his impressive work. Mahamud is an excellent example of the importance of dialogue and inter-faith collaboration in building a more peaceful world. 

We look forward to learning more from community leaders like our visitors from Kenya, and we are energized by the efforts of these individuals to promote peace and global development. To learn more about how GHR is bridging divides through our Inter-Religious Action initiative, contact us.

GHR Foundation's Inter-Religious Action initiative works to improve development outcomes, build lasting community connections and advance peace by mobilizing religious leaders and communities to address common challenges. As part of this work, GHR recently partnered with USAID, Religions for Peace and the African Council of Religious Leaders to co-host a convening in Abuja, Nigeria on partnering for peace and prosperity in Africa. The conference, Faith Works Africa, brought together more than 300 stakeholders from 40 countries to have substantive conversations on how faith actors and inter-religious work can help communities build resilience and address development challenges.

Before the convening, GHR participated in the annual meeting of International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), during which the Foundation’s partnership with the network was approved. GHR is pleased to join an organization that creates such valuable opportunities to share knowledge and learn from our peers. PaRD’s participants share many of our programmatic priorities, as demonstrated by a panel discussing the nexus of religion and countering violent extremism moderated by GHR Senior Program Advisor Andreas Hipple.

During the PaRD annual meeting, numerous bilateral and multilateral organizations gathered to discuss how to strengthen cooperation between donors and religious communities in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals. Many of these organizations went on to participated in Faith Works Africa, seizing an opportunity to learn from the ongoing work of the faith leaders attending the conference.

Faith Works Africa began with an opening dinner, where Vice President Yemi Osinbajo of Nigeria delivered a keynote speech calling for more inter-religious collaboration to build peace in his country and beyond. Other presentations at the conference featured the voices of youth, women, senior religious leaders and other diverse participants. The important stories and experiences they shared inspired the breakout sessions, which were designed to seed new partnerships and fuel the creativity necessary to discern productive next steps. These idea-rich sessions will help inform future inter-religious work.

Several current GHR partners attended Faith Works Africa, including Religions for Peace, the African Council of Religious Leaders, Joint Learning Initiative on Faith & Local Communities, peacemakers associated with the Tanenbaum Center for Religious Understanding, Nigerian Inter-Faith Action Association, Catholic Relief Services and a number of Catholic sisters whose engagement in inter-religious collaboration is growing, especially in Nigeria. GHR also sponsored the participation of 15 Generation Change fellows associated with the United States Institute of Peace—social entrepreneurs and peacebuilders working in their home countries to build peace, counter extremism and work toward justice. For most of the fellows, Faith Works Africa was their first opportunity to engage with high-level religious leaders. Many of them were given significant speaking and facilitation roles, creating mutual benefit for the young leaders and conference participants.
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We are hopeful the meetings held at Faith Works Africa will result in concrete new partnerships, and we look forward to seeing how relationships evolve in this critical field. To learn more about how GHR is working with religious leaders and communities to solve difficult problems, build trusting relationships, strengthen social cohesion and advance peace, contact us.