By training teachers how to pass on important safety messages to their students, DCA will protect more South Sudanese children from mine and UXO accidents.
The three-month project will be implemented by a trained and fully accredited Risk Education (RE) team and an international Armed Violence Reduction Coordinator in the highly contaminated state of Eastern Equatoria. The RE team has been operational in the Kapoeta counties of Eastern Equatoria since February this year and has already built a good relationship with the local authorities communities.
Through UNOPS funded grant, the RE team will provide special training to 50 teachers from schools in the Kapoeta counties area.
They will use materials produced jointly by the Ministry of Education, UNMAS, NMAA and UNICEF. These materials were originally designed to be incorporated by teachers into the school curriculum, but funds for printing the materials and training the teachers how to use the materials properly ran out. This is why this project is so important.
“If we provide RE to children in a school, they will hear the safety messages just once, and then we will leave,” explains Juma, the DCA RE Team Leader. “If we can train the teachers how to teach safety messages and how to put them into everyday lessons, then the children will hear the messages many times, day after day, week after week.
This will increase the chances of the children remembering how to stay safe, and hopefully stop them from doing risky and dangerous things, like playing with bullets and grenades.”
As many of the schools are in remote areas, the selected teachers will be transported to the town of Kapoeta, where they will reside for the length of the training course.
Once the training has been completed and the teachers return to their local schools, the RE team will visit a selected number of the schools to observe how the teachers are sharing their new knowledge and to provide the teachers with extra support and guidance if needed.
The project will begin 1 June and will run until the end of August 2013.