The Care and Protection Program for Unaccompanied Afghan Children is one of the significant Qatari achievements regarding the Afghan refugee crisis. Nearly 260 unaccompanied children arrived in Doha, and the government provided full care for them until they were reunited with their families.
What is the program?
Qatar Charity was assigned to carry out the program. The task was not easy at all because of a wide range of challenges and duties:
The mission required coordination with several parties, the most important of which were:
Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs
IOM
UNICEF
In addition to collaborating to provide support and assistance, and offering various programs and services to children from different entities as follows:
Hamad Medical Corporation
Qatar Foundation
Qatari Social Work
Generation Amazing Foundation
Program guidelines
Qatar Charity was keen to respect the basic and universal principles of child care that guarantee protection, as stipulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including:
To ensure this, Qatar Charity provided the best services for children, including housing and accommodation, as well as a reception center with temporary housing arrangements suitable for children and multi-activity facilities.
Receiving unaccompanied children
The foundation’s mission began with receiving unaccompanied children. This stage involves the following:
Of course, the task was not easy, as Qatar Charity faced various challenges, such as the difficulty of communicating with children and gaining their trust. Thus there was a difficulty of providing assistance that suits the needs of each child, in addition to the most difficult challenge of filling the place of the parents.
In the same vein, there was a fundamental challenge related to the program’s goal of reunification, as the foundation needed to identify the children and find appropriate ways to communicate with their families.
In order to provide adequate assistance to the children, Qatar Charity established a Children’s Council, where children from various homes voted for a child to represent them at a weekly meeting held with the foundation and other partner foundations.
Case Study
Afghan girl M is a 16-year-old girl. As soon as she arrived in Qatar, she was identified and registered by the responsible agencies. A report was written about her and was received by Qatar Charity before she arrived at the reception facility.
The report received by Qatar Charity stated that the girl had just lost five of her immediate family members (parents and three siblings) at Kabul airport seconds before she boarded the plane to Qatar. She was immediately referred to the appointed psychiatrist for an emergency evaluation, and a social support plan was developed for her, which included a multidisciplinary team that included a psychiatrist, a social worker, and caregivers.
Competency-based training for volunteers
233 volunteers participated in the program, and Qatar Charity was keen to provide the necessary training for them to improve their efficiency and help them successfully carry out the tasks assigned to them. The training included the following topics:
Volunteers from Afghan refugee families also signed the code of conduct developed by Qatar Charity and UNICEF, and underwent protection from sexual exploitation and abuse training. Additionally, all caregivers received training conducted by UNICEF staff.
Qatar Charity was keen to carefully select and fully follow up on volunteers, as follows:
Community approach
Qatar Charity relied on an organized community approach to support children, in which a large number of workers contributed, namely:
Community approach
Qatar Charity relied on an organized community approach to support children, in which a large number of workers contributed, namely:
Volunteers witnessed different events and gained many lessons from the experience. Here is Aisha Tanveer’s testimony about her volunteering with Qatar Charity:
I remember the first day I entered the complex, expecting it to be gloomy given the conditions. Instead I was met with screaming children asking if I wanted to play football with them. My first lesson was on resilience and positivity.
In the group of minors to which I was assigned, there was a 13-year-old girl who had lost her mother and two of her siblings. I remember how silent she was, her eyes lacking any expression. She used to sit on the sofa and stare blankly without saying a word, while the others were away. I never pushed her to talk, but I always made sure to say hello and ask if she needed anything.
Thanks to the psychological support, the girl started speaking slowly and told me how she was trying to learn English very quickly. The day I left the compound, she innocently said to me, “I will come to meet you, wait for me.” The girl taught me the importance of providing timely psychological support and giving people time and space to grieve.
The Care Program in Numbers
247 (209 boys – 38 girls)
Unaccompanied Afghan children
233 (138 males – 95 females)
Volunteers
30.03.2022 > 24.08.2021
Care Period
218 (24/7)
Care days
5232
Care hours
After seven months of hard work, Qatar Charity celebrated the reunion of the last three children with their families, thus successfully completing the foundation’s task to care for Afghan children.
