COLLECT

Collaborative Efforts to End Child Exploitation in Karamoja Region

About the project

Project Period: Oct 2024 - Sep 2026 (23.95 Months)

Moroto District in Uganda's Karamoja Region faces extreme challenges, including a semi-arid climate that causes severe food insecurity and poverty, making children highly vulnerable to various forms of exploitation. The reliance on pastoralism, combined with limited economic opportunities and pervasive insecurity, leaves millions of children unprotected against trafficking, slavery, and economic or sexual exploitation.

Educational opportunities are scarce due to few schools, forcing children to walk long distances amidst insecurity, which fuels an alarming school dropout rate (88%). This dire situation is made worse by hunger, nomadic lifestyles, and cultural norms that prioritize early marriage, prompting the COLLECT project to build upon interventions from an earlier implemented similar project titled "Work: No Child Business" project that focused on child exploitation.

Project Focus

The Collaborative Efforts to End Child Exploitation in Karamoja Region (COLLECT) project centers on addressing the major forms of child exploitation prevalent in Moroto District, specifically Child Labour, Child Marriage, and Child Trafficking. The intervention is strategically designed to achieve two key, interrelated outcomes: first, fostering the socio-economic empowerment of families to strengthen their resilience and enable them to better resist and mitigate all forms of child exploitation; and second, directly empowering boys and girls so they can effectively amplify their voices and exercise their agency against exploitative practices.

The project employs an integrated area-based approach, recognizing that achieving sustainable change requires concerted efforts from multi-layered structures, spanning from the grassroots level up to the national level. Success hinges on robust collaboration with various local structures. These include Elders, VSLA groups, Community Mobilizers, Teachers, and Village Health Teams, all of whom are crucial as change agents, implementers of community actions, and custodians of the desired change.

Furthermore, strong and ongoing partnerships are maintained with both government and non-governmental entities. This network includes the Local Government, particularly the Community Development and Labour offices, and key actors within the Justice, Law, and Order Sector (JLOS), such as the Uganda Police Force's Child and Family Protection Unit. These government partners provide vital technical expertise, enforce laws, and are responsible for the scale-up and monitoring of successful actions.

Finally, the project leverages its relationships with numerous Civil Society and UN Organizations (e.g., UNICEF, Save the Children International) to ensure a comprehensive response. These strategic collaborations facilitate essential functions like shared learning, advocacy, capacity building, and the provision of referrals and supplies, thus maximizing the project’s impact on child protection in Moroto.