Kakuma Refugee Camp Holistic Support

IsraAID Kenya’s programs, since 2012, have focused on strengthening community-based and institutional capacities to support refugees and host populations exposed to poverty in the sectors of Mental Health, Protection, and Medical Care, to ensure Kakuma is a place of opportunity. We operate 3 Child Resource Centers (CRC) in Kakuma and Kalobeyei area, providing daily MHPSS (Mental Health and Psychosocial) interventions for children. In the months since COVID-19 began to spread, IsraAID Kenya has shuttered the doors of our Child Resource Centers in accordance with government regulations to close educational institutions toward preventing the spread of the virus. 

Within these circumstances, IsraAID’s Child Resource Centers in Kakuma and Kalobeyei remain closed. In partnership with a local youth community-based organization, we have shifted to overcome the current barriers to providing Protection and Psychosocial support to our beneficiaries, by adapting our service provision models to virtual and remote approaches, shifting to home visits and other small group structures to facilitate a safe environment, and creating temporary projects relevant to this current period. As such, IsraAID’s programs have changed with COVID-19, shifting toward achieving the following goals:

1. Conducting door-to-door or small group child-friendly interventions
2. Adapting our program model to virtual and remote mediums such as call centers
3. Adding COVID-19 specific information—pertaining to local guidelines, safety measures, and coping mechanisms—to all outreach activities, and ensuring that these materials are accessible to illiterate populations as well as those who may face other language barriers
4. Leveraging mass media to broadcast messaging to larger audiences, per recommendations by the Kenyan government
5. Training cohorts of new and ongoing community facilitators to implement the above in a safe, inclusive, and child-sensitive manner
6. Delivering 1400 malaria kits, 400 cartons of nutritional supplements, 2000 masks, and medicine - a total of 9 tonnes of supplies - to our partner IRC to combat malnutrition and malaria

Thank you for your continued support for our projects in Kenya.