UN Population Fund recognizes Standard Operating Procedures Document for GBV
The CBC Health Services (CBCHS) continues to set the pace in efforts on Gender Based Violence (GBV), Child Protection (CP) and disability. The CBCHS has demonstrated her prowess in these areas through partnership with national and international organizations.
Through its Services for Persons With Disability (SPWD) program, the CBCHS used her rich experience in GBV to facilitate in a workshop on the validation of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for GBV and CP for the North West and South West Regions organized by United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Douala recently.
The Standard Operating Procedures document was developed by the Community of Practice Project under the SEEPD program together with other actors on GBV. The document set a standard for the intervention of GBV at all levels to avoid duplications of practices. The SOP won the recognition of Humanity and Inclusion who were willing to fund workshops for GBV stakeholders in April 2019, to review the draft document so that it can go into implementation.
Being the working document that spells out its referral pathway, and its disabilities undertone shared with UNFPA, they invited the CBC Health Services to the workshop in Douala to lead in the facilitation of a session focused on “special consideration for children and persons with disabilities”. The Gender and Child Protection Officer of the CBC Health Services, Ms Nsono Josephine seized the moment to thrill participants through a session highlighting child protection concerns and what to consider in mainstreaming both child protection and disabilities in programs and project cycle management.
In her presentation, Nsono Josephine lamented on statistics presented in January 2019 by UNOCHA that doesn’t intrinsically highlight the prevalence of disability. “Although WHO (2015) maintains that global prevalence stands at 15%, [there is more to it] several persons who live with disabilities lived in both regions before the crisis and several others have and continue to sustain one form of impairment or the other as the crisis lives on,” she pointed out.
During the workshop, the organizers, in consensus, agreed on the dire need to make the SOP inclusive of the needs of affected populations (GBV survivors) with disabilities.
It is interesting to note that the strides being made on advocacy with partners is leading to mainstreaming of disability in humanitarian and development actions particularly in the development of SOP at national levels on GBV with UNFPA.