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Facilitator Feedback: the key to programme success?

Study captures the perspectives of child and youth care workers in adolescent parenting programmes in South Africa
18 Apr 2018

(18 April 2018) A recent UNICEF Innocenti paper, Delivering a Parenting Programme in Rural South Africa: The Local Child and Youth Care Worker Experience, explores the perceptions and experiences of parenting programme facilitators in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The qualitative study builds on previous quantitative research and helps answer the question: How effective is parenting support in reducing violence?

 

Anyone who has ever had a teenager living under their roof understands that raising adolescents can be a challenge. These difficulties become even more pronounced in vulnerable communities, such as the Eastern Cape in South Africa. In 2012, 49% of households in this region had no employed adult, with 80% of children living in income poverty. 33% of children were not living with their biological parents. The area had the highest percentage of assaults in South Africa in 2016. Despite these figures, the Eastern Cape provincial government is committed to change and has invested in community-owned parenting programmes.

Child maltreatment is a serious public health problem. Physical, emotional and sexual abuse affects an estimated 95 million children across the world every year. The high prevalence and seriousness of child maltreatment has resulted in a growing interest in parenting programmes. These preventative interventions can improve child and adolescent well-being by increasing positive parenting leading to reduced violence in the home. “SinovuyoTeen Parent Programme” is one such programme.

The programme was the result of a collaborative effort between multiple bodies. Child and Youth Care workers of the Isibindi programme were trained by Clowns without Borders to facilitate SinovuyoTeen Parent Programme in 2014.

 

A recent Innocenti study describes the perceptions and experiences of the SinovuyoTeen facilitators. The publication forms part of a suite of papers emanating from an exploration of the effectiveness and scalability of a parenting programme in South Africa. A pre-post study, conducted in 2014, quantifiably revealed the positive impact of SinovuyoTeen in the Eastern Cape, including reducing child abuse and improving positive parenting. This study complements the quantitative results with the narratives of the programme facilitators, without whom the programme could not have been offered.

CARE WORKERS: THE KEY TO PROGRAMME SUCCESS

The analysis of focus group discussions revealed four consistent themes:

  1. Programme ownership and adaptations:  facilitators provided recommendations, including content adaptions and logistical suggestions.
  2. Professional synergies: complementarity existed between traditional child and youth work tasks and SinovuyoTeen activities.
  3. Value of trust between child and youth care workers: facilitators had a pre-existing level of trust with the families who benefitted from the programme owing to their child and youth care work in the community.
  4. Personal impact on the facilitators as parents: facilitators themselves reported a positive impact on interactions with their own children.

These results culminate to highlight the importance of understanding and considering the perceptions and experiences of the facilitators who deliver a parenting programme. Their accounts can contribute to programme improvement, ensuring cultural acceptability and logistical viability, prior to scaling-up the initiative. Additionally, involving facilitators in programme adaptation increases their sense of ownership of the programme, which can in turn affect successful programme delivery.

A group of children and adults in a National Association of Childcare Workers (NACCW) safe park in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.

 

Complementing previous work, this study revealed insights that were best captured through qualitative methods, especially focus group discussions among facilitators. This is particularly significant when considering the vital, multi-dimensional role facilitators played in testing SinovuyoTeen while continuing their family support work.

“The value of our qualitative work was to hear the voices of a range of people involved,” says Heidi Loening-Voysey, UNICEF Innocenti’s Research and Evaluation Specialist (Child Protection). “You can get a sense of how their professional and personal lives have changed as a result of the programme.”

 

Follow UNICEF Innocenti on Twitter and Facebook to be informed when the full suite of studies is released. You can also view other content related to this topic in the column on the right. Find out more about the World Health Organisation’s Parenting for Lifelong Health programme here.