www.childhelplineinternational.org
The harmonised European number 116 has been assigned to the new national child helpline in Albania. The national child helpline in Albania is a joint initiative of UNICEF and children’s Human Rights Centre of Albania (CRCA)/Defence for Children International Albania (DCI). The helpline will be responsible to provide combined services in all three assigned numbers: 11600, 116111 and 116123, to all children in Albania, no matter what their nationality.
This is great news for the national child helpline and for all children in Albania. UNICEF and CRCA/DCI Albania expect the national child helpline to be formally established by September 2008 and be able to begin to offer a qualified and professional free of charge service by early January 2009. CRCA/DCI Albania has been running the Tirana child helpline, a pilot project since 2005, with the support from European Commission and Embassy of Netherlands in Albania, and thus is a member of Child Helpline International. However the telephone number was available only for Tirana’s children and was not free of charge. The new service promises to be available to more than 1 million children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while also being free of charge and available from any landline or mobile.
Childline India is a 24 hour free phone emergency outreach service for children in need of care and protection. Childline is present in 83 cities and has been in existence for the past 10 years during which they have received over 10 million calls.
Childline in India works on a distributed call centre model where calls are received at the local Childline offices. Their vision for the year 2025 is to cover every one of the 600,000 villages in India. One of the central components of this model is a centralised call centre. Therefore on 29 – 31 July, Childline India, with the support of CHI, visited Childline Egypt to receive training. The Egyptian child helpline already has a centralised call centre model for their national level child helpline. It provided Childline with a lot of insights into the functioning and organisation of such a call centre, including how to interconnect technically with national ministries.
CHI has supported four team members from the Palestinian child helpline, which is operating under the SAWA organisation in Ramallah, to visit Childline Mpumalanga in South Africa. The visit took place on 8 – 10 July. This visit included information about the handling of the calls, documentation and referrals, while also meeting specific training needs on the documentation of contacts, management structure and management methods of staff and volunteers and awareness campaigns.
CHI attended this conference on 11 – 13 May in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. CHI advocated for the importance of child helplines and the need for structural support.
Background information: The International Policy Conference on the African Child is a major biennial event and the leading international forum in Africa on child rights and policy issues that is organised by the African Child Policy Forum (ACPF), the leading independent pan-African policy and advocacy centre working on children’s rights. The international board of trustees included child rights organisations such as UNICEF, Plan International, Save the Children, The African Union as well as the Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Chair of the African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.
Children are spending an increasing amount of time online. Child helplines will respond to this by having their services available to children online. If the child has a problem, he or she no longer has to call.
The pilot phase of this project was in 2008. From 2009 CHI will replicate this project for several other child helplines, through 1) Expert training with child helpline management; 2) Development of the website; and 3) Expert training with counsellors.
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