COVID was a shock and an opportunity for us to rethink all our programming, the way we design our programs and the way we implement them.
It required very quick adaptations. We lost the opportunity to...obviously, schools, as we all know. Also, with schools came the loss of contact with children, the ability to identify children who needed support and the ability for us to work to bring children together for psychosocial support and mental health services.
The way IRC has adapted its programming has been—as one of our colleagues said—very much working through parents and caregivers and them to provide support to their children. We provided social and emotional learning packs to parents. We provided support through different countries in different ways, such as through radio, community focal points, local organizations and the local partners we've always worked with that had feet on the ground to really provide that support to the caregivers within the home.
We also worked through community focal points to identify children who needed support. There are certain services that we strongly advocate that are life-saving services even with containment measures, such as case management and child protection services. These must continue even with the containment measures. It was a question of how we could provide those services in the households to the child directly, while protecting our staff, the child and the family they are with.
It was really adapting our approaches to ensure that we respect the containment measures, but also that we continue to reach those children who are most in need.