ACCORDING to its 2014 Report, the Child Care and Protection Agency (CPA) focused primarily on increasing inter-professional collaboration with other agencies for the provision of services for vulnerable children to reduce the number of those in need of alternative care.The Agency also focused on providing family assistance to achieve their objectives, among which included State care; partnership with other professional childcare groupings, including Child Link and Forward Guyana, as well as other NGOs; response and assistance; and foster care and adoption.

Approximately 520 children became recipients of State care in 2014. Alternative situations to parental care were always a last resort when the separation of children from their biological families was deemed necessary, because of abusive and/or other situations inimical to the child’s wellbeing.
Partnerships with Child Link and Forward Guyana precipitated the “The One-Stop”, which was a child-focused, facility-based programme in which representatives from key child welfare and protection stakeholders, including the police and the NGOs, collaborate to investigate reported child sexual abuse and exploitation cases. This resulted in care being provided for in the vicinity of 50 child abuses.
The Report stated that 20 children were returned to their biological parents after training for the parents as part of the Parental Skills Development Programme.
The Response and Assistance section of the Agency provides a 24-hour hotline service that, in accordance with its mandate, responds and, if necessary, assists in child abuse cases by placing victims in either alternative care arrangements with other families, or providing safe places, with recovery of victims being primary focus.
Although its primary focus is to re-integrate families, many times this is not seen as a viable option after several assessments, even after parental training in best practices in child care. Hence the Agency’s resort to its Foster Care and adoption programme, with as many as 203 children being placed in alternative, more desirable home situations for the child victims.
Potential foster care and adoptive parents are screened, then trained, if approved, and children approaching the age to leave the programme, attaining the age of majority without family linkage, were given opportunity to acquire employable skills and other special training for independent living through the Ministry of Culture’s Youth Entrepreneur Skilled Programme, the Kuru Kuru Training College, and the Guyana Industrial Training Centre.
Apart from their employable skills, CPA’s staff, particularly its frontline workers, engage in a continuum of training programmes for the development of a competent corps of professional workers to optimum capacity.
As the Government implements programmes to develop the country, Guyana’s most vulnerable, its children, are not forgotten; and through the CPA, much has been achieved in protecting and caring for the nation’s children.