KOMF: Kosovo to step up efforts in child protection

The Coalition of NGOs for Child Protection in Kosovo has addressed the main recommendations released by the Children's Protection Index for the most critical areas in need of immediate intervention.

The index has assessed five dimensions of Kosovo's actions referring to child protection. These five dimensions are policy and law, services, capacity, coordination and accountability.

The index points out that Kosovo has a huge gap between adopted legislation and its implementation.

Kosovo must now implement legislation and provide adequate resources through which it will empower the child protection system. Kosovo must make financial investments to build capacities that would bridge the gap between legislation and its implementation.

General recommendations:

Security of sustainable financing and adequate for social services in Kosovo through changing Law No. 03 L-049 for Local Power Finances and the creation of a Special Grant for Social Services;

The approval of financial standards in line with quality standards;

) Operationalisation and empowering co-ordination mechanisms at the central level as well as melting co-ordination mechanisms for protecting children at local level, in a mechanism;

) Establishing foreign and independent inspection mechanisms to examine the quality of available services (private and public) and manage licensing;

) Planning and implementation of the process of mandatory licensing for public services provided by the QPS or other public authorities;

) Securing child participation processes in any decision-making process for children;

Opening a new free phone line designed with and for children. The service should accept calls and offer support, advice for children in situations of violence, abuse, neglect, drug abuse, trafficking and other forms of exploitation;

Research and collection of data should be consolidated to determine the number of children in each municipality, the number of disabled children, children involved in work, children victims of narcotics abuse, etc.

While critical areas Kosovo has shown poor results and the index recommends that urgent action be taken are: protecting disabled children, protecting children involved in serious work, and protecting children victims of narcotics abuse.

We expect the government, municipalities, donors and members of civil society can use recommendations from the Index on increasing service delivery, institutional capacity, co-ordination and accountability, to close the gap between legislation and its implementation.

Complete communication, as well as recommendations for specific areas of child protection, can be found in three languages, in related documents.