What We do

Our Core Objectives

1. To strengthen national and community systems and structures for effective protection and promotion of children’s and women’s rights.

At national level, we are working with the Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Development, UNICEF and the national Child Protection Working Group to strengthen child protection systems at national and regional level. This initiative involves defining and articulating a child protection system that is responsive to the needs of all children.

Other upstream policy initiatives that we support include; improving stakeholder coordination, data management and analysis, standardizing and accrediting child protection training curricula and increasing access and enrollment to professional child protection training programs.

At sub regional level, we are supporting 8 local government administrations in North Western Uganda to scale up responses and planning for interventions targeting orphans and other vulnerable children.

While at community level we are working with both the formal and informal child protection systems in a concerted effort to prevent and respond to incidents of child rights violations. Our community level work also involves strengthening the circles of support around the child.

2. To increase access to psychosocial and mental health services to vulnerable communities.

Using a community oriented model, we build capacity of informal and formal structures to be able to identify, manage and support the psychosocial needs of communities living in difficult circumstances particularly those in the contexts of conflict and post conflict, HIV/AIDS and poverty.

Our mental health approach focuses on a combination of clinical interventions, which entail integrating mental health care into primary health care systems and non clinical treatments which place an almost equal emphasis on social support and home based care for persons suffering from mental illness.

For instance in post conflict northern Uganda, TPO Uganda has over the past 5 years following the end of the conflict, supported over 15 public health centers to integrate mental health care into their primary health care systems. While at the same time we have empowered over 150 patient support groups to improve household care and support for persons with mental illness and to fight stigma and change community attitudes and perceptions towards mental disorders.

3. To enhance vulnerable communities’ capacities to manage and respond to socioeconomic shocks.

This objective entails interventions and activities that promote community managed disaster risk reduction and sustainable ecosystems management. We are presently working with flood prone communities in Eastern Uganda to adopt environmentally sustainable human practices, facilitating communities to develop early warning systems and implement responses that prevent and mitigate the effects of floods such as destruction of property and famine.

We are also enlightening communities on how they can manage their environment better in a more sustainable manner through school based environmental programs and community managed disaster response initiatives.  Other interventions under this objective include; food security and livelihoods improvement activities which we have tried to integrate across all our projects. As example in Western Uganda, we are supporting households of vulnerable children to improve the way they manage the dietary needs of children for positive nutrition outcomes, promoting the village savings and loans schemes as part of promoting household financial literacy, socio-economic innovativeness and local entrepreneurship.

We believe that communities can only engage in meaningful development if they can co-exist and relate peacefully with one another. Hence alongside these other interventions, we promote peaceful co-existence and tolerance particularly among communities that have experienced conflict and civil unrest. We work with traditional leaders such as councils of elders supporting them to play an active role in peace building and access to social justice. Additionally we promote community driven platforms for regular dialogue and communication on topical issues through which potential conflict trigger points can be identified and forestalled.