The Department of Social Development (DSD) on Tuesday visited the District Child Protection Team (DCPT) in Leribe for feedback on ending child marriage campaigns.

Speaking at the meeting held on Tuesday at the Hlotse Department of Social Development in Leribe, the Director Children Services, Mrs. Mookho Motheo said the campaigns started in 2019 to date.

Mrs. Motheo said this, they deemed imperative to assess the impact on these mechanisms for determination of further intervention strategies to be implemented in ending this humongous quandary.

In addition, she asserted that they deal with one Community Council per district, where they use three different approaches to derive information, namely interviews, focus groups and questionnaires.

Mrs. Motheo highlighted that they hold interview sessions for the key informants at Community Councils such as the local chiefs.

“With Focus group discussions, we deal with groups of women, men, students and House to House interviews to the families having children between the ages of 12- 17 years,” she stated.

Furthermore, she noted that the questionnaire inquires among others, challenges relating to child marriage, consequences and other related information.

“Lastly we focus on key informants at district level such as local authorities, District Administrator, and DCPTs,” she added.

Talking about Leribe, she applauded the Leribe DCPT for the meritorious effort that they exert when executing their activities, noting that Leribe is the only district that has written a well-quantified report (substantiated with numbers) and that the team’s efforts are commendable and deserve appreciation.

She stated that Leribe DCPT is currently leading the pack with its commendable work, adding that they even presented Leribe’s report to UNICEF and were elated that all the recommendations that were threshed at the review were followed by the Leribe team.

She referred to the challenges that the DCPT representatives cited which included transport, reporting template, failure to respond to referred cases of children under the age of 5 years, more especially those that need to be supported with baby formulas and diapers due to budget constraints.

In response to the team’s concern about the objectives provided in the reporting template, which in their view restrict confining and incomprehensible, they said the objectives are mandatory because they emanate from NSDP II, so they are immutable, on the issue of the incomprehensible content of the template they promised to hold a workshop to interpret the whole content on the reporting template.

She added that they contemplated to hold a workshop before the end of October and before their visit, saying they would have reviewed the content of the template and its objectives.

They said they are catering for the documentation and packaging of DCPT content materials so that when they do messaging to the communities, the same message is disseminated because in their view, currently the districts have different messaging which can be confusing to communities.

They promised that immediately after they are done with the packaging, they will support DCPT activities.

Similar meetings will be conducted in all the 10 districts.

Source: LENA 05/09/2023