PAHCHAAN

Globally, 1 billion children experience physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect. This results in adverse childhood outcomes especially in low-income countries, where illiteracy, ignorance and lack of political will compound protection issues.

PAHCHAAN (Protection And Help of Children Against Abuse and Neglect) aims to protect and empower children against abuse and neglect. To date it has protected over 20,000 abused children and families by providing them with  education and healthcare support. 

Currently, PAHCHAAN lacks a platform to monitor progress of these abused children creating challenges to measure care and education delivered. Our solution is an easy to use application that continuously monitors and evaluates health and education of abused and neglected children. By capturing and continuously monitoring each individual’s progress under the slogan of ‘one child at a time’ PAHCHAAN can build effective and personalized solutions for the children and scale to other communities.

In 2017, the WHO estimated that up to 1 billion minors between the ages of 2 and 17 years of age have endured violence either physical, emotional, or sexual. This rate is higher, especially in developing countries due to extreme poverty and lack of education. Adverse health outcomes that result from such abuse include impaired brain development, negative coping, health risk behaviors, physical injury and death. In addition, unemployed workforce increases and more people come under the poverty line. Hence, child abuse does not have an impact only on individuals but also on the community.

PAHCHAAN is a non-profit organization based in Lahore, Pakistan. Currently,  PAHCHAAN focuses on 2 main goals:

1- EDUCATION: PAHCHAAN has collaborated with University of Lahore to establish a Child Rights Department, where it is educating students so they could become better professionals and parents. Also, PAHCHAAN has established schools in low income and slum communities to educate more than 500 children a year. Our solution, will allow an easy-to-use tool that supports both formative and summative assessment of the students to better support their growth at the schools. This can help PAHCHAAN make informed decisions about their psychological and educational progress. 

2- HEALTHCARE: PAHCHAAN manages more than 150 child abuse and neglect cases each year through its Child Protection Unit, Children Hospital Lahore. It has been able to sensitize 1000 caregivers and stakeholders to prevent their children from falling prey to abuse and neglect of any kind. Our solution will allow for monitoring and evaluation activities that will analyze whether the program components were implemented correctly and recommendations on additional help the children need.

Our solution is an application that monitors and evaluate the progress of abused children, streamlining the process of ensuring that each child PAHCHAAN works with receives appropriate treatment. The application will be built using CommCare and will be available on Android tablets. 

The application will consist of two platforms:

1- Education: 

• Keep an electronic record of student scores, attendance, and other data for academic performance to monitor their progress

• Send evidence-based activities (via SMS or Whatsapp) that cover all domains of learning (cognitive, motor , language and social/emotional) and record responses.

• Analyze each student’s education gap and growth to make recommendations to teachers on areas to focus on.

2- Health care: 

• Coordinate follow-up appointments and home visits to enhance the continuum of care after the children are discharged from the clinic at Children Hospital

• Record data and recommend solution once the community mobilizers have assessed how the child is feeling once it has been discharged at to go home

• Track patient progress at the Mother and child health care facilities in rural areas

Our approach is innovative in three ways: 

1) Efficient Monitoring and Tracking of Data : Currently, Pakistan has no data for abused children. At PAHCHAAN all education and healthcare processes are manually filled out intake forms, school forms and data files for its clients. This system misses out information through incomplete filling in of data, is cumbersome and can not collate information from different projects. 

2) Easy to Use: PAHCHAAN’s practices in child protection and safety through the use of a CommCare application that will replace the current manual system. CommCare is a platform that is available both online and offline, requires little training, and is easy to use.

3) Personalized care: The data received will be evaluated to provide recommendations that personalized to each child in the education and health care department.

EDUCATION PLATFORM: The PAHCHAAN team will include teachers and administrators who will input the children’s attendance, score reports and daily progress on the app. This will be compiled to make a benchmark to monitor their progress throughout the time they are enrolled in the school and help the teachers and the organization to make informed decisions about the children and their curriculum. This will also enable SMS service to the parents about their progress and intiate household activities

HEALTHCARE PLATFORM: The PAHCHAAN team includes existing medical staff, doctors and nurses, will be responsible for collecting patient histories of children  who are performing necessary medical exams. They will input the data at the Children Hospital and Mother and child care centers in the application. Finally, PAHCHAAN’s IT department and IT consultants will be responsible for creating an Excel spreadsheet to digitize patient files and evaluate results Administrative staff at PAHCHAAN will be responsible for purchasing equipment, such as tablets, required for tracking cases.This equipment will be kept at the PAHCHAAN office at the end of the day, and data collected on the CommCare application will be imported into the patient’s file  to recommend informed decisions.

To consider the HEALTHCARE PLATFORM:

The logic model above was designed to illustrate the expected activities and outcomes of PAHCHAAN’s home visitation program. The logic model sets the context of abuse and neglect in Pakistan by stating the assumptions and external factors that could influence the program along the bottom of the model; these factors highlight the political atmosphere, cultural barriers, and gender and economic inequities. The assumption and external factors have the potential to facilitate or hinder the program’s success.The details of the activities, outputs and outcomes of the project are located in the main body of the model. The model depicts the temporal sequence for how activities will lead to outputs, which will ultimately result in outcomes of short, intermediate, and long-term effects related to reducing child abuse and neglect in Pakistan. For example, a CommCare application will be developed and installed on Android tablets, which the community mobilizers will be trained to use and implement during home-based follow up visits. The training will in turn increase the community mobilizers’ knowledge of how to effectively use the application, which will ultimately allow them to track data on children post discharge from CPU. This will also recommend solutions for the PAHCHAAN team to determine next steps for each child.  An additional component of the model is inputs, which displays existing resources that the home visitation program has access to prior to the program’s start date.

Currently, PAHCHAAN has served over 20,000 abused and neglected children and their families by their education and healthcare facilities. The solution’s goal is to design a comprehensive continuum care until every child is safe from abuse and neglect in Pakistan. This can be more effective and efficient with advancement in technology. To progress towards this goal, the solution has two main objectives:

1. By the end of year one, efficiently monitor and track progress of abused children CommCare application to protect at least 10% more abused children

2. By the end of year five, increase the percentage of children receiving care to up to 30% more abused children

We hope to evaluate the success of our programs  and progress of the children through the data gathered by the app and make informed decisions for the organization and children. 

By the end of five years, we hope to extend our partnerships with more local hospitals in Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta to extend similar education and healthcare platforms for abused children in major cities in Pakistan. 

The Potential barriers include: 

1. Training the staff efficiently to record the data

2. Integrating the mobile application into existing operations as we expand to other hospitals

3. Financial constraints as additional personnel will be needed to reach children in an expanded geographic region

4. Reluctance of family members, teachers, or other stakeholders to provide a child’s data for collection via Android tablet

1- Have training resources and materials prepared established by hiring at least college graduates students to run the program. The program manager will use the monitoring indicators to ensure the activities are on track, and the data analyst will use the evaluation indicators to compile a report for dissemination to PAHCHAAN leaders and stakeholders. 

2- Cooperate with multi-disciplinary teams from our partner hospitals to identify the additional steps needed to use the technology platforms as soon as possible

3- Apply for grants and establish partnerships which will allow us to limit the financial constraints to extend across Pakistan. 

4- Educate the families and have training for them to incorporate and validate regular data.

1- Software Engineer - Full time 

2- Program Manager - Full time 

3- IT Consultant - Full time 

4- Data Analyst  - Part Time 

Dr. Naeem Zafar - A pediatrician who has worked in Pakistan with abused children with more than 14 years. 

Fiza Shaukat - A biomedical engineer from Boston University who was experience with program management and implementation in developing countries such as Lima, Peru. 

Katherine Hildebrand - A master's Public health student at Boston University student who has experience with software development and designing digital health programs.

Farooq Shaukat - A computer engineer and consultant at Accenture who has experience with application development.

Partnerships are mostly an understanding to work together and collaborate for a positive outcome of projects and program areas. Depending on the nature of the problem, these range from support of human resource, of ideas, technical support and collaborative work. The partnerships augment the effects of each other in attaining results and support in local networking and advocacy. We help in each other’s capacity building and taking the agenda of child rights further.

1- Punjab Provincial Co Chair of National Action Coordination Group of South Asia Initiative to end Violence Against Children (NACG-SAIEVAC) which is a SAARC body from 2016-2020

2- Child Protection and Welfare Bureau

3- Ministry of Human Rights Islamabad and National Commission for Child Welfare and Development NCCWD for advocacy on Child Rights Issues (No formal MOU exists though)

4- Member Board of Governors of Punjab Welfare Trust for the Disabled a body of Social Welfare Department of Government of Punjab

We are providing free services to abused and underrepresented individuals in the community. Currently our source of revenue is through local philanthropic donations, Zakat and Members contribution. At the moment we do not have any international donor funding except occasional individual donations through crowdfunding.

The path to sustain financial stability would be through transparency. We have focused this year to expand the scope of donation by resource mobilization through social media. 

Being a part of the Solve community will open doors to an abundance of resources which we would not have access to otherwise. One of the clearest opportunities we see is the unadulterated access to workshops, mentors and advisors who have experience consulting projects like ours and can provide us with guidance at every step of the way. Additionally, we will be able to get  access to an exclusive community of expert who understands the challenges we will face and how best to preempt and overcome them. Finally, we will be able to learn from other solvers in the program the general best practices of how to run a project, hurdles faced early on and how to tackle them, and how to establish guiding policies and procedures.

In addition to benefiting from these tangible resources, there is also a less obvious value to being a part of the Solve community. All of our team members have taken on some sort of role at an innovation-focused organization. In our experience, simply being in the presence of other innovative change-makers gets us excited about building a better world. While prototyping alongside other teams late at night, workshopping new and exciting business ideas, or grabbing coffee with visiting members, seeing the community around us will give us the energy we need to power through our rockiest moments and bring our vision to fruition.

Our target population are the 1 billion neglected children who are from under represented communities across the world who can not receive  education. Currently, we are focusing in Pakistan. These children belong to low income families who have never been to school and are neglected by the household. We have developed schools in these slum and low income communities to educate these students on the basic sciences and maths. Our goal is to equip these children with tools they need to become active members of the society and progress to proper government school. Through evidence based activities that cover all domains of learning like cognitive, motor , language and social/emotional we hope to empower them to think and inspire them to complete their education. 

Our solution, will help to track and monitor their progress at the school. It will allow PAHCHAAN to make informed decisions about their education and if they are ready to progress to the government schools or need any more psychological, financial or legal help. The families of the neglected children can be more actively be involved through the SMS service to incorporate STEM related activities at home. Moreover, the technology will allow the entire community in these areas to progress with the education of the children. 

Our target population are the 1 billion neglected children who are from under represented communities across the world who can not receive  education. Currently, we are focusing in Pakistan. These children belong to low income families who have never been to school and are neglected by the household. We have developed schools in these slum and low income communities to educate these students on the basic sciences and maths. Our goal is to equip these children with tools they need to become active members of the society and progress to proper government school. Through evidence based activities that cover all domains of learning like cognitive, motor , language and social/emotional we hope to empower them to think and inspire them to complete their education. 

Our solution, will help to track and monitor their progress at the school. It will allow PAHCHAAN to make informed decisions about their education and if they are ready to progress to the government schools or need any more psychological, financial or legal help. The families of the neglected children can be more actively be involved through the SMS service to incorporate STEM related activities at home. Moreover, the technology will allow the entire community in these areas to progress with the education of the children.