“SOS Children’s Villages of India supports close to 25,000 children and youth through two flagship programmes – Family Like Care, a curative model that provides loving homes to children without parental care in Children’s Villages. Family Strengthening, a preventive model that intervenes in vulnerable communities for preventing ‘at risk’ children from losing parental care by upholding family income through women empowerment and capacity building. The year 2020 has been eventful in many ways. The pandemic impacted children under our care in several ways. As we self-implement these programmes, our teams quickly adapted by building the capacity of caregivers and coworkers, safeguarding villages from infection, enabling digital learning for children, looking after their emotional wellbeing, supplying essential food and hygiene kits to vulnerable families who lost livelihoods and so on.  The year also witnessed four cyclones (Amphan and Nisagra in the second quarter and more recently Nivar and Burevi in the southern region) causing a further blow. All these disasters have rendered millions homeless and without a livelihood. Our teams evacuated cyclone-affected families and shifted them to safer places, providing essential supplies – food, water, shelter, clothing, and medicines. They are currently working on restoration for the families affected. 

We signed two MoUs with the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of Gujarat for providing technical expertise and for being the nodal agency for the State’s Kinship Care and After Care programmes. The annual cultural festival e-Tarang was hosted virtually. The event witnessed participation from over 700 children from both the programmes across 32 locations/22 states. We have reached out to 2500 new children in 2020 through our community outreach interventions.  We have also set up two quarantine centres in Bhopal and Pune, wherein abundant children are getting family-like care and are being prevented from the impact of COVID-19.  Our teams are working tirelessly to help secure the livelihoods of families in the communities we serve. We plan to reach out to 8000 new children in 2021 and there is a need for greater collaboration. We are grateful to our partners and sponsors for their continued support.”