Improving Family Cohesion Using a Comprehensive Family Program Addressing Parental Skills and Mental Health Issues in Traumatised Parents in Burundi

Children living in poverty often are at risk to leave their family to work at the landfill. The main reasons for this are torn family systems, family violence, exclusion, poverty and a lack of intra-familial communication. Psychological stress due to past political crises diminishes parents' ability to provide a safe environment for their children and often leads to maltreatment in the families. Children in the district of Buterere who spend their days on the streets or on the landfills of Bujumbura, Burundi to earn a living are particularly vulnerable. The project aims to create a safe environment for these young people and to strengthen their family structures in the long term to prevent them from losing family cohesion due to poverty and lack of support. For this purpose, we plan to treat traumatized parents psychotherapeutically and to improve their parenting skills within the families in group and family sessions. The individual trauma treatment aims also at reducing aggression problems frequently associated with trauma in order to reduce negative consequences for the children. The group sessions for parents aim to address subjects such as parenting skills, alcohol abuse, family planning, and conflicts amongst couples. The family visits aim at reinforcing communication between children and their parents. The financial situation is to be improved in the medium term through agricultural group projects. In addition, participating children and youths will be granted access to school and education, and participate in a skill training group. In the long term, parents are to set up savings and micro credit groups in order to ensure the education of the children. This multifactorial design should help to reduce the above-mentioned main risk factors for living on the street. The project involves 40 families, which are particularly affected by poverty and traumatic experiences. The legal guardians within the families are identified at the beginning of the project and directly involved to strengthen upbringing skills, to improve the economic situation of the family and to enable the adults affected by the violent political crises in Burundi to deal with their own psychological problems. In addition, one child between the ages of 5 and 20 per family is identified as the main beneficiary. This serves to gain a deeper insight into the family's communication and, in particular, to take sufficient account of the children's perspective. Through the integral approach of the project, which guarantees psychological, medical, social, legal and economic support, the children are to be protected from increasing violence on the streets and from family violence in the long term. The project is based on scientific findings of the implementing organizations, which carried out similar projects in Burundi in the last years.