ChildVoice International (CVI)

ChildVoice acts on the conviction that children broken by war can be restored in safe, therapeutic settings with loving care, spiritual and emotional counselling, and effective education and vocational training. This is accomplished through both community-based and centre-based programmes. As part of its community-based efforts, ChildVoice establishes Empowerment Centres and Groups within internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and refugee settlements, where a high percentage of adolescents are orphaned or are part of child-headed households with extremely limited means of meeting their basic needs and protecting themselves against abuse. These Centres and Groups provide an array of psychosocial and livelihood-related services — including long-term aftercare — for vulnerable and traumatised adolescent girls and their children, directing and equipping them for a life of self-empowerment. For the most highly traumatised and vulnerable, ChildVoice operates centre-based programmes which includes a boarding school, non-traditional educational programs, a vocational centre, and in-depth counselling services for those girls who need long-term care in order to actuate the healing process and care for their own children. The skills, healing, and love our students receive doesn’t end when they leave our residential programmes. After they graduate and move back to their communities, they enter a three-year program of follow-up counselling, business-skills development, and mentoring. We want to ensure these young women successfully reintegrate with their communities and families—as more than 90 percent of them do. Above all, we stress to each and every girl that they will always be a part of the ChildVoice family. In seeing such radical transformation in the lives of some of the most vulnerable youth across Africa, we started to dream about bringing our theory of change to the rest of the world. Through several partners and local enquiries of support, we started the journey of making this a reality by beginning work in Ukraine and Moldova in 2023. Through our Ukraine and Moldova project, most of our work is geared at coming alongside local individuals, organisations and churches to help build programmes for at-risk youth in the region. This has been an exciting and innovative approach: through partnerships, collaboration and creativity, we continue to develop holistic interventions with a heavy focus on long-term sustainability and local ownership. Through this integrated, intentional approach, we now dream with our local brother and sisters of enormous communities of resilient youth with strong senses of agency and hope. Our collaborative partnerships have been essential to contextualising and adapting well-understood best practices into innovative, yet indigenously-rooted strategies. No longer bound by their status as war-affected, traumatised, internally displaced or socially orphaned youth, we work hard to support youth move toward healthy, productive, independent and thriving futures. Improving access to healing and holistic care in war-affected communities is a thrilling experience: we get to be a part of seeing communities transformed for the better. We're excited and hopeful to see this across the world.