The Roving Caregivers are St Lucia’s Unsung Heroes
Ruth Phillips Fevriere, Coordinator of the Roving Caregivers Program.
“Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It’s a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don’t say you can’t afford to fix it while you’re building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay, it’s are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.”—Marian Wright Edelman American Activist for the Rights of Children.
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On Wednesday November 25, the Roving Caregivers Program organized a Media Sensitization Workshop at Auberge Seraphine, aimed at increasing the visibility for the program. The program is an early stimulation intervention program intended primarily for children from birth to three years who are living in situations that put them at risk and also for those who have little or no access to any sort of early childhood facility. What makes this program different is that it is home-based; the services are brought to the people, in their homes and the primary caregiver of that child has to be present. The rationale for that is to ensure the parent is empowered with the necessary parenting skills, attitudes and practices that are needed to achieve optimal development in the child.
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Ruth Phillips Fevriere, Coordinator of the RCP, spoke at length about the program at the workshop. She said: “The program has been in St Lucia since 2004 and it is well known in the thirty communities where we are presently operating but it is one of St Lucia’s best kept secrets. We felt the time was right now for us to go national; to let all of St Lucia know there is this program in existence, that can make a difference, that is making a difference, that we would want to partner with everybody else because of the nature of the program. It is so easy to fit into all systems whether its education, health or social transformation because it’s a community-based program happening in the homes of the different families. We are hoping that out of this exercise the media will have a better understanding of the role of RCP and that we will be able to forge a lasting partnership with the media in getting our message out to the St Lucian public at large about the role of RCP and help RCP become a household name.”
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The point that everybody tried to drive home in this session is that it is not only about education. This program is about social development. It’s about building capacity; both social and human capacity. Fevriere believes with fervor that “it is time we stop making children’s issues a soft issue.”
“We need to stop paying lip service to it; remove things about children from the back burner and bring it to the fore,” she expressed.
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“We must stop sensationalizing everything else and then focus more on a sector that is virtually voiceless. We must become the voice for our nation’s most vulnerable, make a concerted effort to change policy, to change thinking, to change attitude, to bring back respect, to stand by all those children conventions that we have signed and really make children the focus and center of all our efforts in terms of development.”
Citing numerous reports and figures; Fevriere proved that “investment in early childhood education in birth to three years is the greatest investment that any developing nation can make because the returns later on are phenomenal.
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“For so long we have tried doing the top down process yet we have more social problems,” she said. “We can’t keep up. We need to target the root, the homes. We have an opportunity with this program to change thinking, to do things where we can mold and shape children to become critical thinkers, reflective thinkers, just, productive citizens.”
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In 2007, the main donor to the RCP, the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, wanted to get some empirical data from the Caribbean to substantiate RCP’s belief, that the early years are the foundation
years and that is where the heaviest investment needs to be made. In July of this year, the first year of the findings found that across the board, in every developmental domain, the children enrolled in RCP are doing much better than their peers who are not exposed to the program. It is also showing a difference in the attitude, perception, skills, and abilities of the parents who now better understand their roles as parents, who are now better empowered to communicate and interact in a more meaningful manner with their children. Fevriere said: “It proves the point that earlier is better.”
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