UNICEF Annual Report 2017 Oman

UNICEF Annual Report 2017

Oman

Executive summary

Oman maintained a Human Development Index ranking of 52 out of 188 countries in 2016, awarding it a high human development status. Progress achieved in promoting the rights of children has been recognized by the Committee on the Rights of the Child; the Committee encouraged the Government to take more steps in protecting children from violence and promoting the rights of children with disabilities.

Approximately 1 per cent of children below the age of 15 have disabilities. Oman's range of disability services are limited to major cities and are provided by non-governmental organizations or others of variable quality. There is inadequate data to define the scale of child maltreatment due to the nascent case notification system, stigmatization and culturally accepted practices not recognized as maltreatment. Oman met target 1 of the Millennium Development Goals to halve the prevalence of underweight children under 5 years of age; that rate is now 9.7 per cent. However, the prevalence of stunting has increased to 14 per cent from 10 per cent in 2009, and the prevalence of wasting is 7.5 per cent.

Within its first year, the UNICEF Oman Country Programme capitalized on its technical advantage to work with the Government on devising progressive solutions and shifting from standard practice to achieve greater impact in the areas of integrated early childhood development (IECD), protecting children from violence and inclusion of children with disabilities.

Some of the programme's major achievements included:

? UNICEF Oman supported quality education by shifting from projects to nationally mainstreamed interventions. UNICEF Oman and the Ministry of Education (MOE) reconceptualized their work on child-friendly schools from school-based projects to childfriendly education (CFE) as a mainstreamed organizing theme. Similarly, UNICEF worked with MOE to develop an institutionalized training programme on inclusive education for sustained rollout.

? UNICEF Oman provided technical expertise to implement the Oman National Nutrition Survey (ONNS). Initial survey findings updated data on stunting, wasting and obesity, and highlighted geographic trends of concern. The survey has provided insights on interventions required to accelerate progress in the nutritional status of Omani children and women. The findings were validated in a meeting with relevant Ministry of Health (MOH) sections and will be used for cross-sectoral national consultations and planning as well as a United Nations joint plan of action.

? UNICEF Oman launched work to establish cross-sectoral referral mechanisms in IECD, protection and inclusion. Cross-sectoral links were clearly recommended in all related national strategies but had stalled in the face of some administrative hurdles. UNICEF Oman persisted and conducted phase 1 of mapping strengths, challenges and gaps in

1

2017 to great impact. Phase 2 of designing systems, protocols, roles and responsibilities continues in 2018.

? The work of a programme management group (PMG), proposed by UNICEF Oman and established by ministerial decree, has been instrumental. Formed of representatives from MOE, MOH, the Ministry of Social Development (MOSD), the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) and the Supreme Council for Planning, the group took a holistic look at the UNICEF Oman programme and promoted more efficient crosssectoral linkages. In a country programme where proposed interventions are progressive and uncustomary to Oman ? such as cross-sectoral holistic platforms, or communication for development ? this cross-sectoral collaborative partnership was key in advising on links to the governmental decision-making canvas, reducing resistance to change and resolving obstacles.

Challenges to UNICEF Oman Country Programme progress include data availability and the financial crisis.

The Child Well-being and Empowerment Index (CWEI) has not been finalized due to missing intra-national data and data dissonance across sectors. An assessment of the bottlenecks in child data systems will be carried out in 2018 to determine how UNICEF Oman can strengthen them.

Oman, like other oil producing countries, has been affected by a reduction in oil prices resulting in government budget cuts enforced for the second consecutive year, including cuts to education, health and social sectors (4, 3 and 5 per cent decreases in their shares of the national budget, respectively).

Although UNICEF Oman was spared another cut in its government grant in 2017, this financial strain necessitated finding innovative ways to maximize existing and potential resources for children, in addition to re-positioning UNICEF Oman's communication and fundraising strategies.

Thus, this year, communication and advocacy highlighted UNICEF Oman's programme and role in promoting a child rights agenda and in facilitating connections with private sector entities for future engagement. Accordingly, detailed mapping of potential private sector funding partners and media was carried out in October. One of UNICEF Oman's priorities in this programme cycle is supporting the Government in finding public finance solutions for children.

Equity in practice

UNICEF Oman pursued the equity agenda across its programmes with the Government, most notably in the area of disability and inclusion. Individual activities with the various sectors were consolidated into critical advances in disability data, influencing national policies and strategies and supporting capacity-building to maintain good standards of service delivery.

In the previous Country Programme (2012?2016), UNICEF Oman worked with MOE, MOH and MOSD on various activities. These included a multi-phase capacity-building effort with social workers on the `Portage Programme' to support families of children with disabilities, a review of the national disability law to ensure alignment with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with

2

Disabilities and technical assistance to MOH in developing data tools.

These activities were accompanied by advocacy and awareness raising, laying the foundations for a concerted push to promote the rights of children with disabilities. First, this influenced the research and evidence agenda. NCSI adopted the child functioning modules into their Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey and other disability databases, initiating a shift in how disability was reflected in statistical data.

UNICEF Oman began work with MOSD and NCSI on developing a unified disability classification for Oman and bolstering the disability register that will feed into the e-Census 2020. Additionally, the rights-based equity-focused situation analysis of children and women in Oman (SITAN) provided a holistic analysis, while diagnostic studies conducted in preparation for developing the National Ten-Year Autism Action Strategy (2016) and the National Social Work Strategy 2016?2025 (2015) compiled qualitative data.

The National Social Work Strategy, through an extensive study conducted at a subnational level, examined social service delivery for vulnerable groups, including persons with disabilities, and MOSD's capacity to deliver those services. This study's evidence base remained some of the only such data available on children with disabilities in Oman. This data informed Oman's 9th National Development Plan and guided the development of the current UNICEF Oman Country Programme 2017?2020, in which inclusion of children with disabilities is one of the three priorities.

UNICEF Oman engaged with MOSD in developing the National Social Work Strategy 2016? 2025 for the express purpose of ensuring that the rights of vulnerable children are included. Within that development process, the rights of children with disabilities were mainstreamed across the pillars of social protection and social welfare, among others, as well as being established as a stand-alone pillar to further support national programming. These rights were also clearly incorporated into the multi-sectoral national childhood strategy that UNICEF Oman developed in collaboration with MOSD in order to drive all childhood policies.

Although developed with MOE, the national autism action strategy included considerations for all sectors and stakeholders, including parents, and provided a framework of action across sectors. Accordingly, MOH adapted an autism screening tool and referral protocol used in all primary healthcare centres at children's regular 18-month visit. The strategy was also translated into MOE's Five-Year Autism Action Plan to facilitate the inclusion of children with autism in regular schooling.

UNICEF Oman leveraged this process to advocate for including children with other disabilities and began work with the Specialised Centre for the Professional Training of Teachers on institutionalizing an inclusive education training programme to be rolled out to all regular classroom teachers. As a first step in this process, a teacher's guide was developed and field tested based on the Omani curricula for cycle 1 (Grades 1?4) and an accompanying training of trainers programme was designed. In 2018, work will continue to develop similar tools for cycle 2 (Grades 5?10); the programme aims to reach 50 per cent of teachers within four years.

Equity in services is also being addressed in current technical work on establishing crosssectoral referral platforms and creating an accredited early intervention training programme to address the lack of services outside of big cities. UNICEF Oman also coordinated a social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) programme to systematically engage stakeholders, to support the formation of parent support groups and address social attitudes towards

3

disability.

One of the main lessons learned through this experience was the need to work both upstream and downstream while engaging all sectors. The inequitable experience of children with disabilities is both cultural and structural. While advocating for inclusive policies and national strategies is critical, there is rarely knowledge or capacity for how these are to be interpreted programmatically.

Strategic Plan 2018?2021

The UNICEF Oman Country Programme for 2017?2020 aligned in many ways with the UNICEF Strategic Plan 2018?2021, with programme pillars responding to Goal Areas 1, 2, 3 and 5. The three main programme pillars are: 1) integrated early childhood development; 2) protection of children from violence; and 3) inclusion of children with disabilities.

Additionally, Oman presents an opportunity in terms of implementation strategies. Within this high-income country context, the Government-UNICEF Oman joint programme capitalizes on UNICEF's added value by pushing for innovative and progressive implementation methods. UNICEF Oman aims to move beyond the siloed traditional services and programming focused on expanding access to institute cross-sectoral, holistic best practices. In line with the Strategic Plan's `Change Strategies', the UNICEF Oman country programme will pursue an equity agenda with the following major, intersecting strategies:

? Utilize UNICEF's proven convening role to build stronger links between the key implementing ministries and support them in producing advocacy tools with which to engage the Council of State and the Shura Council. This strategy will sustain the implementation of major policy initiatives for children and strengthen oversight and accountability to children and their families in relation to national policy goals and standards. The establishment of the PMG and technical offshoots has initiated this work by bringing stakeholders from different sectors to the table to redress inequities affecting children.

? Facilitate a systematic and evidence-based approach to designing, budgeting for, delivering and monitoring government programmes and services, using targeted research and data disaggregated by region, sex and household income.

? Support the design and effective delivery of SBCC strategies tailored to the Omani context and promote positive behaviour change for critical child-care behaviours and practices.

In the absence of a United Nations Development Assistance Framework, UNICEF Oman and other United Nations agencies in Oman, namely the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), have identified possible opportunities to work together on government commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and nutrition.

UNICEF Oman will undertake a mid-term review in 2018 that will focus on one to two strategic results that will contribute to the Strategic Plan.

UNICEF Oman faces the following challenges in this work:

4

? There is a need for more robust and disaggregated data, including behavioural and qualitative data as well as data on the quality and sustainability of health and education services received, for planning and monitoring programmes.

? UNICEF monitoring systems do not adequately reflect the needs of programmes implemented in high-income countries. UNICEF Oman has developed its own monitoring and evaluation framework linked to government statistical databases, but regular reporting mechanisms may miss some achieved results.

? The time required for the adaptation and buy-in of change strategies presents a challenge. For example, as there are no pre-existing models of cross-sectoral referral systems in IECD, protection or inclusion, such non-traditional interventions being proposed to the Government remain abstract and require ample time for adoption and ownership before implementation.

Emerging areas of importance

Integrated early childhood development (IECD). UNICEF Oman has taken the lead on IECD in partnership with MOE, MOH, MOSD and NCSI, establishing it as one of the three programme pillars in the current UNICEF Oman Country Programme 2017-2020. In discussions, UNICEF Oman and the Government have committed to improving a number of IECD indicators during this period, such as (1) the percentage of children aged 36?59 months attending an early childhood education programme (2014 baseline: 29 per cent; 2020 target: 60 per cent); and (2) the percentage of children aged 0?5 months exclusively breastfed (2014 baseline: 17 per cent; 2020 target: 40 per cent).

In 2015, the prevalence of stunting increased to 14 per cent from 10 per cent in 2009. The wasting prevalence of 7.5 per cent is a cause for concern; it suggests that infant and young child feeding practices are suboptimal and that hygiene and diarrhoea are problems. Additionally, Oman's Early Childhood Development Index rate, at 68 per cent, lagged behind those of countries with comparable incomes.

The programme is much more holistic and strategic, systematically approaching proximal to remote levels of stakeholders and partners in IECD.

UNICEF Oman began supporting the Government in developing a National IECD Policy to safeguard previous joint work on developing national early childhood development standards, integrating IECD in the national strategies for childhood, nutrition and social work and creating an investment study for early childhood education.

Additionally, the Government and UNICEF Oman addressed the lack of wide-scale IECD services by working to consolidate available IECD services at the wilayat (province) level and setting a standard model that can be adopted by concerned ministries singly or jointly. This effort aims to develop an Omani model for IECD service delivery through existing community spaces, such as preschools, civil society centres and community-based learning centres, while maintaining global good practice standards for care, stimulation and development.

Laying the groundwork for this, work on designing cross-sectoral platforms to ensure the continuum of care in IECD, protection and inclusion of children with disabilities launched in 2017. This involved an extensive desk review and consultations in four diverse governorates with parents, government service providers, decision-makers in the education, health and social

5

development sectors and private sector kindergartens to map out the system currently in place and identify its strengths, challenges and gaps.

In a validation workshop conducted at the end of the field work, preliminary observations were shared as well as first thoughts on the main design elements of the cross-sectoral system, building on structures and resources that currently exist as a first step. The multiple strands feeding into a comprehensive and coherent national IECD programme are being strategically woven to ensure the greatest sustainable impact, despite limited capacities and strained resources.

Other elements in the 2017?2018 Rolling Work Plans (RWP) with all government partners included establishing accredited training programmes for IECD and early childhood intervention professionals, as well as supporting parents and caregivers in essential care practices. A national SBCC programme on better care practices in early childhood, protection and inclusion, which has been conceptualized and prepared for launch in early 2018, will supplement and sustain these efforts. A prominent public figure has been approached to champion IECD in Oman, which would provide immense support to ongoing advocacy and awareness efforts as well as mobilize resources.

UNICEF Oman also made great strides in generating robust evidence pertinent to children's early years through the implementation of ONNS. The survey, which was jointly conducted with MOH, investigated the causes of micronutrient deficiencies in children under 5 years of age, non-pregnant women of reproductive age, and pregnant women, disaggregated for all 11 governorates.

The initial findings were shared for discussion and validation on 10 December and provided invaluable data on stunting, wasting, obesity and micronutrient deficiencies to guide targeted, effective policy and programme interventions. The survey also shed light on feeding and caring practices that would be pivotal for integration into the national SBCC programme, as well as highlighting potential areas for additional investigation. ONNS will form the basis of MOH nutrition planning in the coming years as well as helping consolidate and coordinate United Nations agencies' interventions in nutrition and food systems.

Through these negotiated layers of implementation, the UNICEF Oman Country Programme presents an excellent learning opportunity and case study for countries in the region or with similar contexts in practical modalities for accelerating and sustaining effective IECD systems.

Summary notes and acronyms

CFE CMT CPAP CWEI FAO GSSC ICT IECD MENARO MOE MOH MOSD

child-friendly education country management team Country Programme Action Plan Child Wellbeing and Empowerment Index Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Global Shared Services Centre information and communication technology Integrated Early Childhood Development UNICEF Middle East and North Africa Regional Office Ministry of Education Ministry of Health Ministry of Social Development

6

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download