By Nalwadda Nsangi Mara
In an effort to strengthen and enhance child protection services in Arua city, the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs has through Save the Children Initiative donated nine motorcycles to the city to help in timely response to cases of child abuse, domestic violence .
The leaders in Arua city received the motorcycles and appreciated Japan for the donation they said will go a long way to ease service delivery by addressing the gap in the transport.
Jobile Cornelius, the deputy town clerk of Arua city and Sam Nyakua, the city mayor said that the donation has come timely to step in the gap the city had in the transport department.
“While we have probation officers based at division level, the coverage of the city is quite enormous. It was practically difficult to reach every cell of the city and in that way, the personnel handling child related issues were overwhelmed because we have a huge gap in terms of transport. We have departments without a single motorcycle as we have not done asset-sharing with the district of most of the movable assets, they are still held at the district, Jobile said.
Nyakua said, “There has been a huge gap because when we were declared a city, the only resources we have are of the former Arua Municipality, so the departments whose work is field based cannot perform properly because the transport is not there.”
Pascal Freeman, the regional area manager of Save the children said the donation follows a surge in cases of teenage pregnancies, domestic violence, child abuse, child labour, school dropout, child abandonment and failure to provide.
“This is in line with the findings of the state of protection with the city and the district. The teenage pregnancies are on high, meaning that children are going through abuse and many cases of violence against children that have been reported within the city and we want to respond to them timely.”
The donation has come with recruitment of officers to add on the human resource of the city to address child protection issues and help to prevent, respond and protect children from abuses.
“The project is going to recruit us nine social protection officers who will be based at the former sub-counties and this will enhance easy reporting because these project staff we are going to recruit will be the ones feeding our probation office with information about child protection services”. Jobile said.
The obligation of maintaining the vehicles is left in the hands of the Arua City Council under the department of community services which will ensure adequate allocation for servicing and other logistical support.
“It is our responsibility as the city to ensure that we budget adequately for issues of fuel and maintenance and this is part of the MOU that we signed with save the children,” the Arua town clerk said.
He however warned the officers who will receive these motorcycles to refrain from misusing them.
“We have a standing order provision that will apply to every movable asset assigned to a particular officer, so we will invoke that provision when we discover that somebody is misusing it.”