‘Our approach is unique. We work from the inside out using local counsellors'

Organisation: HNI TPO

Project: ‘The Mbila project'

The Mbila project's focus is Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This concerns a phenomenon which first arose in major African cities in the mid-1990s: the rejection of children and adolescents by their families. 'Our project tries to find answers for the cause of this problem,' says Jaak Le Roy, consultant at HNI TPO.

In Africa, if people (young or old) have or develop mental problems they do not visit a psychiatrist, but are taken to a traditional or religious healer. 'If the latter says the child is cursed or making the family ill, he or she will be rejected,' Le Roy explains.

Shelter homes 

As a result there are between 20,000 and 30,000 rejected children living in the streets. Many NGOs started taking care of these children. They are taken in by shelter homes, but reintegration into their families is generally very difficult. 'Our point of departure was how to re-enable the ties between children and their families and communities, and how to prevent social rejection,' says Le Roy. 'We wanted to know what we could do.'

Le Roy then started work in collaboration with a local volunteer organisation ‘Association pour des Projets Psycho-sociaux'. He studied what caused the children's rejection. Family problems and conflicts were the principal cause. There were also other background factors: 1. Poverty and rapid cultural changes play an important role. 2. War and political instability. 3. Major unemployment among fathers. 4. The increasingly important role of women. 5. Children becoming more autonomous.

Mediation 

What exactly did you do besides carry out research? 'We offered to provide counselling and therapy to the organisations who look after the children," says Le Roy. 'But also mediation between conflicting parties such as fathers/mothers, sons/daughters, husbands/wives and grandparents/parents.'

The HNI TPO project uses local counsellors for the counselling and therapy. Teachers and other key figures from the local community are, for example, trained to be counsellors. Le Roy: "what is innovative is that we work from the inside out, because these people understand their own culture and have experience with the families' problems and know what are culturally adequate or inadequate solutions," explains Le Roy. "They have close ties with the community and know how to address the elderly and children. They are trusted and can really touch people."

Unique 

But why should the Mbila project win? 'Our approach is unique. We work from the inside out and try to learn. For example, we learned that such an approach is only sustainable with families if it is supported and implemented by a network of local NGOs with various objectives (e.g. education) and formal organisations such as the municipality. The intention for us as organisations in a community is to now learn to cooperate instead of coming up with partial solutions on our own. By doing so together and learning from this, we reinforce the community's support and resilience for dealing with the very stressful challenges of the modern-day Congo. We try to apply what we learn here elsewhere.'