Empower Children and Communities against Abuse (ECCA)

ECCA works to facilitate the gendered institutionalisation of sustainable community empowerment, psychosocial support, and policy advocacy structures that focus on the prevention of gender-based violence. In order to achieve this, ECCA implements its activities under the following five programmes:

Psychosocial Support Programme - ECCA provides counselling to survivors of gender-based violence to alleviate psychological trauma. According to the organisers, advancing the profession of counselling is an essential element of psychological intervention in confronting abuse. This programme includes one to one directional counseling; group support counseling; couple counseling; social follow- up; referral; and letter writing counseling.

Research and Advocacy Programme - Research is undertaken in the areas of GBV and findings are used to foster effective lobbying and advocacy for ending GBV; fighting for human rights for children, men, and women; and individual empowerment. The ECCA Advocacy and Research department works towards obtaining the commitment and support of policy decision makers and community leaders to address gender-based violence. In order for this programme to be effective, it is accompanied by activities such as media programmes; sensitisation seminars and workshops; production and distribution of posters, banners, leaflets, flyers, and calendars; consultative meetings; workshops and conferences; and the presentation of working papers to provide a basis for discussion.

Capacity Building Programme - This programme is designed to strengthen the capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions to address GBV in Uganda, through training workshops and production of manuals and handbooks for trainers and users. The programme provides both in-house training for its own staff and community training. The capacity building programme works in conjunction with the advocacy and research programme to develop information material.

Child support programme - This programme is designed to address the needs of vulnerable ECCA children clients and their guardians through providing child sponsorship and family empowerment schemes. This programme works to help:

• severely abused and sexually abused children;
• children at risk of reported abuse and sexual abuse;
• orphaned children and children from extremely economicaly impoverished backgrounds;
• families that are economically disadvantaged;
• families in which women are increasingly in abusive relationships;
• families with women who are affected and infected by HIV/AIDS; and
• children affected and infected by HIV/AIDS.

Community empowerment programme - This is ECCA's outreach programme for the community. Through this programme, women and men, individuals and groups, community leaders, child welfare practitioners, service providers, and parents work to:

• reduce poverty levels among the community;
• provide social support to each other;
• promote social change among community members; and
• improve service delivery among service providers.

According to the organisers, ECCA continuously collects evidence on GBV in a gender sensitive and professional way. Since 2001 they have carried out an analysis of the print media on cause, effects, prevalence, and trends in GBV.

Children, Gender, HIV/AIDS, Rights, Women, Youth.