Two Filipino anti-child trafficking organizations attended workshop on protecting children’s rights through efficient data management in Cambodia

The Philippine Against Child Trafficking (PACT) and Zamboanga based NGO, Tanglaw Buhay Center- Katilingban sa Kalambuan Inc. (KKI) represented the Philippines in the three-day data management workshop, “Protecting children’s rights through efficient data management” sponsored by Terre des Hommes (TdH) Netherlands held in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Addressing  child  trafficking and issues of other groups of children on the move requires  a  clear and in-depth  understanding  of  current  trends  with regard to survivors, people involved, the modus operandi, trafficking and migration routes, different forms of abuse and exploitation children are subjected to and reasons why children left their homes.

“An information structure and effective data management are tools to generate information for programming: prevention work, ensuring provision or access to services, measure on how the mandated agencies are performing and bases for identifying lobby points and advocacy agenda,” TdH Netherlands said in a statement.

Tanglaw Buhay Center further said “primary information about cases of child trafficking survivors and other children on the move are most of the time difficult to gather.  There are also situations that gathered data are not systematically documented and analyzed due to limitations in terms of capacity, resources or infrastructure.”

“Efficient data management could result to timely and effective response to the rights of survivors of child trafficking,” PACT said.

Data could reveal trends like which time of the year or what particular factors push or pull more children and young people to be recruited or leave their homes or what are the common vulnerability factors for these children who decided to migrate independently.

Many anti-child trafficking organizations face technical challenges in managing the disparate sets of data gathered and utilized by their different programs.  Legal support may be managed by one unit, direct support services by another, campaign and advocacy by another, and so forth.  This can work if managed well, but if not, this fragmentation of data can hurt the organizations in a number of ways: duplication of effort, which wastes resources; decision-making based on incomplete information, which increases risk; and organizations sending different messages to stakeholders, potentially affecting the credibility/validity of the data.

Terre des Hommes Netherlands is currently supporting temporary shelters and drop in centers in Laos, Philippines, Cambodia and Thailand. All country networks on anti-child trafficking and focal organizations in the Destination Unknown Campaign are contact organizations for both government and NGOs and even for community-based organizations for case referrals.  Each of these organizations may have established their own system of case documentation, data storage and retrieval for cases that they directly handle or for cases that they refer; a system that serve an internal purpose or addresses a particular objective.-end-

Press release
June 3, 2015