Focusing on child rights in Somaliland

Zahra is a widowed mother of five children and lives in a makeshift house made from anything she could find - pieces of cardboard, torn fabric, old bits of carpet, fragments of corrugated iron and flimsy PVC, the latter normally supplied by international organisations for temporary emergency shelter. Zahra lives with four of her children in a neighbourhood not far from the SOS Social and Medical Centre in Hargesia. She and her children are beneficiaries of the centre's Family Strengthening Programme.

The FSP is run from the SOS Social and Medical Centre which adjoins the SOS Children's Village Hargeisa. The focus of FSP work, according to Chris Jalle, the National FSP Coordinator for Somaliland, is child rights. The starting point is the family, which is assessed for child rights violations, such as lack of shelter, clothing or education. Once a family has been identified, the centre staff seek the cooperation of the community elders (in this case four men and four women), before requesting the support of local and national government.

The FSP is working with three specific communities in Hargeisa. The first is with refugees, often from war torn Somalia and the Somali region of Ethiopia. They are very poor, some are sick because of war wounds, some are orphans, and some are from child-headed families. The second group works with HIV positive people. While the government hospitals will supply free anti-retroviral drugs to these people, the SOS Medical Centre treats secondary infections. Being HIV positive is considered by many in Somaliland to be a curse, and sufferers are often shunned, which presents another challenge in that many people do not want to disclose their status. The third group is women who have been widowed due to the civil war in the late 1980s. These war widows benefit from skills training, and their children benefit from free medical care. The target is that by mid 2009, 1000 children will be supported by the SOS Family Strengthening Programme.

Zahra is a war widow. Despite the impoverished state of her dwelling it is very clean inside, although the walls and roof leak when it rains and she has no mattress to sleep on - just a mat. The FSP is assisting Zahra with free medical care for herself and her children and is also teaching her business skills so that she can restart the milk business that she used to have before she became ill. Two of her children are at school. Education is not free but with the support of the community she is able to send them to school.

For children in the developed world the issue of child rights is often about choice - the choice whether to play or watch television, to eat now or later, to wear this or that dress. But for many children in Somaliland there is no choice. Child rights for them, are the rights to sleep under cover, to eat decent food and to attend school. While SOS Children's Villages will help them to achieve those rights, attaining the choice that many other children have will take much longer. Meanwhile, the children themselves will grow up quickly, knowing that income equals food equals survival. In Somaliland, even for children there is no time for dreams.