Association for Volunteers in International Service (AVSI)

Uganda is home to over 900,000 child refugees and asylum seekers. The majority of these children are from South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, countries that have been plagued by violence for years on end. After watching armed groups ransack their homes, these children often had no choice but to leave everything behind and start over – attempting to rebuild in overcrowded refugee camps miles from their homes. Many of these children have lost or do not have all forms of personal and legal identification, especially those who were born in refugee camps in Uganda. For many of these children, their parents do not have legal identification or knowledge of the importance of birth registration. This can make it impossible for these children to enrol in public services. And to make things worse, the public services that refugee children do have access to – like education – are often under-resourced.

To mitigate these situations, Association for Volunteers in International Service (AVSI) used support from the Fund to:

• Advocate for birth registration of children under the age of 5 from host and refugee communities, resulting in almost 16,000 children identified for registration. Of those, over 7,750 children were successfully registered in the government system.
• Increase children’s safety in seven schools on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. To do so, AVSI utilized the Good Schools Toolkit methodology, which was developed by Raising Voices, a member organisation of the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children. The Good Schools Toolkit decreases violence in schools by emphasizing the importance of positive discipline, nurturing school environments, progressive learning methodologies, and strengthened school governance.
• Improve children’s home environments by training over 3,000 caregivers in positive parenting skills and positive discipline.