Strengthening Community Safety Nets (SCSN)

The Strengthening Community Safety Nets Project (SCSN), managed by ChildFund International with partners URC and Christian Children's Fund of Canada, is promoting the healthy child development of 50,000 children and assisting 8500 primary and secondary caregivers in the Addis Ababa and Oromia regions through comprehensive, family-centered, and child-focused care and support services. URC is leading the introduction of quality improvement approaches to strengthen programs for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), enhance OVC services, and use data to meet OVC service standards. Vulnerable children committees (VCC), community-based volunteer groups, have formed QI committees, identified critical gaps in services for OVC, and designed and applied solutions to address shortcomings.

• Assist community volunteer organizations to develop indicators and set up systems to routinely collect data on compliance with OVC service standards to monitor progress in meeting those standards and
• Work with Ethiopian nongovernmental organizations and VCC to implement QI activities and provide technical assistance for a range of community-level OVC interventions.

• Built capacity for demonstrating QI activities at four service delivery pilot sites and used the lessons learned from those pilots to integrate and scale up quality improvement interventions to all nine participating areas, encompassing 78 communities and
• Helped to develop, finalize, and roll out the Government’s national OVC service standard guidelines.