INTERNATIONAL CHILD DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES (ICDP)

South America, Central America, India, Europe, Russia, Israel, and Africa

"Keep children alive and provide them with the love and attention they need."

While this dictum may seem obvious to all, it is hardly the case in areas of the world where poverty, migration, natural disasters, wars, and cultural change conspire to deprive children of their most basic needs. Enter the International Child's Development Program (ICDP), a care program for at-risk children throughout the world.

The ICDP approach is based on the idea that the best way to help children is by helping the children's caregivers. Wherever the basic psycho-social requirements for childhood development are lacking, ICDP provides caregivers with the competency skills they need to help children thrive. Reactivating quality care for children is achieved through a fundamental understanding of cultural traditions and by fostering indigenous practices. ICDP focuses on:

• Working with communities that are uprooted by extreme poverty, migration, war, and disease.
• Providing training classes to help reactivate the caring skills of parents and caregivers with the ultimate purpose of breaking the cycle of poverty and neglect.
• Building competence and supporting existing child caring-systems while identifying, respecting, and fostering cultural and indigenous practices.
• Stimulating child care development through sensitizing, rather than intervening and imposing concepts and regulations from outside the culture.

ICDP also aims to take on new challenges such as assisting older children and developing empowerment programs for women throughout various cultures.

ICDP was founded in 1992 and under the leadership Professor Karsten Hundeide, a developmental psychologist from the University of Oslo, has provided services and workshops in 27 countries, including Angola, Tanzania, Denmark, Ukraine, Bosnia, Indonesia, Colombia, Brazil and Serbia. Some of the target groups include refugee camps, poor communities (urban and rural), schools, and orphanages in addition to working with the caregivers of AIDS affected and abused children and families displaced by war. ICDP has trained more than 11,000 facilitators/trainers and worked directly with over 28,000 parents, caregivers and families to affect the well-being of more than 112,000 children, many on an ongoing basis.

                        
In 1993, the Division for Mental Health of the World Health Organization (WHO) evaluated the psychosocial intervention program developed by ICDP. The program was subsequently adopted and its manual published as a WHO document. Close cooperation with UNICEF has been established in several countries, and is particularly strong with UNICEF Colombia. If you have helped support ICDP in the past through Susila Dharma USA, we thank you for your contribution. 

                         
                 Ilaina Ramirez (photo on the left) and Patricia Garcia (on the right) are the
                     ICDP trainers implementing ICDP in Luis Arango Cardona