The Child's Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN) is involved in numerous projects:

• Rescue Missions
• Shelter and Rehabilitation
• Advocacy Programmes
• Networking
• Counselling
• CRARN Academy
• Skill Acquisition
• Volunteer with CRARN
• Back to School

Rescue Missions

CRARN advertises hotline numbers to respond urgently to SOS messages from members of the public who volunteer information about stigmatisation, abandonment, torture, trafficking and other abuses of children. Our co-ordinators across the State work hard in a very hostile environment to rescue children who are badly affected by the scourge witchcraft stigma and abuse. Field volunteers and staff equally work on the streets to rescue stigmatised children and take to the only Nigeria shelter that protect such children. Police are sometime contacted and guided to rescue children locked up in churches, toilets or dark rooms, tortured or starve to die by piece-meal.

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Shelter and Rehabilitation

Stigmatised children ostracised from their home and those rescued are given shelter at the CRARN Children Centre, Eket. The only emergency refuge meant for the pariah children. More than 450 children have been rescued to the centre and almost 300 reunited with back families after a thorough counselling and signed undertaking. This shelter has a functional borehole provided by the Latter Day-Saints Charities, a multipurpose complex which comprises of the girls hostel, dinning room, counselling lab and a mini kitchen provided by the UNICEF and Zenith Bank. A hostel for the boys and play ground.

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Advocacy Programmes

CRARN works with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to carry out advocacy and enlightenment campaign in the communities to get the people informed that children or any other person for that matter can not harm and individual using spiritual power. Advocacy and enlightenment campaigns are carried out on a quarterly basis, including monthly townhall meetings, to dissuade parents and families from ostracising or torturing their children, on whatever guise.

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Networking

CRARN networks with organisations such as UNICEF, NAPTIP (National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and related matters) Young Humanistas Network (YHN), Solid Rock Kingdom Church, The Way to the Nation, Oron Cultural Troup, and Foundation for Sound Minds and Crisis Intervention (FOSMACIN), etc. This networking helps to reach out to other groups and individuals for greater co-operation aimed at enlightening the society to stop the child witch-hunting.

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Counselling

Ensuring the provision of professional and trained counsellors to counsel parents to counsel parents who feels their children are possessed with witchcraft power and are capable of wreaking havoc to them or bring down their economy

Children who are traumatised due to torture and abandonments receive one-on-one counselling as well as children who are brain-washed by religious preachers to believing that they possess witchcraft spell.

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CRARN Academy

The CRARN Academy is a centrally located school in the CRARN Children Centre basically for the abandoned and ostracised children who can not attend public or other private schools around the community consequent upon the witchcraft stigma. It has a pre-nursery, nursery and primary (elementary) classes. This academy was established in 2006 and graduated more than seventy children to secondary (middle and high) school. More than fifty children attend secondary schools outside the CRARN Academy. These are distant schools which involved hiring bikes and vehicles to convey the children to schools,

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Skill Acquisition

Some children, who can no longer go to secondary school after graduating from the CRARN Academy, are given the opportunity to learn trade outside the centre. Such trade which include but not limited to spray painting, carpentry, tailoring, motor bike and mechanic vulcanising, electrical works, etc.

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Volunteer with CRARN

CRARN wishes to invite interested persons who would like to volunteer with CRARN either in the USA or Nigeria to contact us with a brief letter of intent.

Volunteer opportunity abounds. If you would like to organise an advocacy or a fundraising program, please do not hesitate to contact us through this email for details: info@crarn.net or call +1-832-537-2573.

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Back to School

More than 75% of the children reconciled with family still depend largely on the support of CRARN to go back to school. Given the very low income of the carers of the reconciled children, we provide the children with quarterly support to see through their nutrition, Medicare, transportation, books, clothing and toiletries.

Back to School Project of CRARN is to ensure that no child is left behind in the much competitive world where education remains the bedrock of economic advancement of every nation.

HOME BASED CARE:
Giving out abandoned stigmatised children to home based carer is a new initiative by CRARN which began since 2010. Working out modalities through advocacy on one-one basis with people in communities, where a particular child belongs after a thorough enlightenment and educating of such carers about superstition and fear of witchcraft.

Though, most of the children have to be transported to distant schools to avoid discrimination, bullying and stigmatisation in the nearby community schools. We also give direct support to the home based carers to embark upon petty trading good for sustainability which gives them the capacity to also support the abandoned children trust in their care.

These two measures are other unique ways to support children at home and in their community, is in line with UNICEF new research recommendation which strongly discourages long term institutional care. To ensure compliance with this, CRARN tries as much as possible NOT to keep a particular child longer in the centre. This is however, also, in keeping with its new policy of making the CRARN Emergency Centre a transit Camp for the ostracised children.

Please, if you will like to support a particular child with meal, education, Medicare, clothing, or toiletries, please, contact us for more information.

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