The Women and Family Affairs Department:

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The Women and Family Affair’s Department  the consists of two units,   namely  the Social Rehabilitation Unitwhich  deals with the issues of  orphans and vulnerable children, the Elderly and people with disabilities and the Women in  Development  unit which  deals with  the projects and programs  that  help women in economic, social and cultural  empowerment.

The Objectives of the program is:-

1. to mainstream child protection and child safeguarding  into all ECC development programs so that all Church projects will incorporate child protection issues as crosscutting issues and  ensures the well-being and development of orphans and vulnerable children through equipping participants with the necessary child support methods, and to provide the necessary technical and material support to child support projects/programs,

2. To help improve the socio-cultural and economic status of women and girls by improving the social and educational status of the  women and girls, improve the  livelihood of women and disadvantaged families, reduce the health effects of harmful  practices and attitudes on women and girls, reduced the impact of climate change on the production of the family,  and to

The Social Rehabilitation Unit has three components; one focused on orphans and vulnerable children and the others on the elderly and people with disabilities.  At present there are 41 child support programs/projects of these nineteen are community based nineteen institution based and eleven providing mixed support both at institution and community level.

The Women in Development Department program helps to ensures women’s equality and equity and to establish effective and sustainable programs by mainstreaming women’s issues into the social and pastoral activities of the church. The Unit is currently implementing three projects, namely the “Enhancing woman and Girls’ Socio-economic Wellbeing”   Engaging Religious Leaders in Dialogue to improve the health status of women with a special focus on harmful traditional practices, and engaging FBO’s for the well being of women and girls.

There are 53 formal and informal women promotion projects/centers under the Ethiopian Catholic Church institutions and congregations.   There activities vary from creating  awareness  on social and economic situations , teaching women  about personal and environmental health hygiene, training them in  skills such as embroidery, dress making, card making,  improved  agricultural methods such as backyard gardening, poultry production, and health educations  home making  and  entrepreneurship, basic business skills to improve and managed their incomes , and savings and credit  schemes. It also includes rehabilitating commercial workers child care and educational support to girls and literacy classes to women and creating awareness and finding a way of stopping harmful practices that affect the  health and well being of women, girls and children.

 

The economic, social and cultural development support given to women, children and the elderly and people with disabilities is to make the development sustainable both at the individual, family and community level. These are done through capacity building trainings, creating income generation activities, enabling people to combat climate change, which affects most of the vulnerable groups, organizing and empowering them to join the microfinance groups in their areas, so that they get access to loans and credit, and facilitating experience sharing forums, as well as providing technical support through monitoring visits to the various projects and programs.

At present the department facilitates the implementation of the Child Protection policy the  ECC Stand on Female Genital Mutilation of the Ethiopian Catholic Church through the various diocesan  projects/programs of the Ethiopian Catholic Church.