Project Aims
The rapidly growing refugee crisis sparked by the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 saw Lumos, along with many other child rights protection organisations, shift towards the provision of humanitarian aid. Thanks to the support of both international and local partners and donors, we’ve been able to provide urgent life-changing support to internally displaced families in Ukraine as well as to refugees settling in Moldova.
One such partnership has been the implementation of the “Ukrainian Refugee Crisis Response in Moldova” project, financed by Terre des Hommes Netherlands and started in December 2022. The six-month project had a total budget of just under 200,000 Euros and was designed to support local authorities from four districts – Floreşti, Ialoveni, Glodeni and Teleneşti – in their efforts to provide help and support for refugee children and families hosted by local families. The project’s main objectives were:
- To help refugee children and their families meet their basic and essential needs
- To facilitate appropriate access to educational and healthcare services for refugee children
- To engage these children in community child and youth participation activities
- To strengthen capacities of the national and local public authorities, service providers, frontline specialists and other professionals as well as local NGOs to provide an effective emergency response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
Read the full details of this partnership:
To ensure the smooth implementation of the project and ensure the achievement of its objectives, four cooperation agreements with local public authorities from Floreşti, Ialoveni, Glodeni and Teleneşti districts were signed, and activity plans have been developed in partnership with them, meeting approval by the respective District Councils.
The activities included within the project involved refugee children and their families as well as those from the host communities, professionals from social assistance, education and healthcare sectors, and local public authorities. Safeguarding and child protection were prioritised, with Risk Assessments conducted for each activity to identify and eliminate any possible risk and to ensure the safety of all participants.
Some of the activities included:
- Activities for refugee and host family children to encourage social cohesion and child and youth participation
- Support with accessing social, education and healthcare services
- Distribution of humanitarian aid
- Building professional capacities of frontline specialists through training and methodological assistance sessions, workshops and other meetings.
Through these activities, 900 people - refugee and host community children and their families - have received life-changing help.
To make support the proper delivery of assistance, Lumos conducted a series of training sessions for public authorities and professionals from the education, social and healthcare sectors focused on working with refugees, providing help in emergencies, identifying and preventing all kinds of abuse (including trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse) and organising social cohesion activities with refugee children and children from host families in the local community.
”I’m thankful for the offered opportunity to learn and gain experience of working with refugee children,” said Ekaterina Turcan, a psychologist from Glodeni. “It was not easy- it was challenging and demanding. However, with Lumos’s support and thanks to all the methodological assistance and training we’ve received, we managed to have an impact on the lives of all refugees that found their temporary homes within our district”.
Mariana Balan, a child protection specialist from the district department of social assistance, added: “On behalf of the entire team of professionals involved in the implementation of the project here in Telenești, I’d like to thank Lumos representatives for their dedication and support, for their readiness to always provide guidance and answer our questions about helping refugee children and their families. And a special thank you to Terre des Hommes Netherlands for helping all this happen, for their generosity and for choosing Lumos as their implementation partners.”
Over the course of the project, over 1,300 people participated in training sessions and other capacity building activities aimed at strengthening the professional abilities of the representatives from the social assistance, education, and healthcare sectors to provide assistance to refugee children and their families, as well as to work effectively with host communities.
”We tried a new approach with the distribution of humanitarian aid this year,” explained Lumos’s Valentina Ghenciu, the manager of the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis Response in Moldova project. ”Instead of physically distributing packages with pre-selected food and other items we signed a contract with a carefully-selected retailer and issued vouchers for the refugees to spend on what they need the most.”
“This gives us the freedom of choice and the possibility to get the type of food and products we need and want,”said Svitlana, a refugee from Donetsk who has been in Moldova for over a year.
