SOS Children’s Villages continues its partnership with Al Tamimi & Company to provide support to the future of children in Iraq.  With the help of partners such as Al Tamimi the Iraq relief programme continues to yield positive results, impacting thousands of lives in great need.

The relief programme was designed to respond to the needs of people who were heavily affected by the crisis. SOS adopted a unique approach, based on needs assessments and focus group discussions, which focuses on serving internally displaced people at an individual, family, and community level.
At the individual level, SOS strengthens the skills of children, youth, and adults by giving them tools and techniques to cope with their traumatic experiences through the Teaching Recovery Techniques (TRT) method. During the project period, SOS Children’s Villages was the only organization that adopted such a unique methodology for psychological support of children, which has proven to be very successful in a particularly difficult context – dealing with a highly traumatized population.

At the family level, SOS provides Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) to parents so that they can deal with their trauma and better care and support their children. We strengthen families economically through enrolling them in vocational training and supporting them with income-generating activity.

At the community level, SOS raises awareness of human rights and child protection and organizes anti-gender-based violence, social cohesion, and peacebuilding communication campaigns.

The SOS-Al Tamimi partnership has been extended throughout 2018 in support of the Iraq Relief programme. Al Tamimi continues to show great commitment, as a leading UAE-based law firm, in improving the situation for Iraqi in the neighboring and strives to support SOS efforts in ensuring the success of this programme. The impact of our programme on the displaced community in Duhok remains very high. During the pilot phase of the programme, which ran from September 2016 to April 2018, SOS was able to reach up to 10,000 participants through various services and support.

The pilot phase enabled SOS to build expertise, acceptance from the community, and a better understanding of the local context and needs. The second phase of the emergency response programme in Iraq, which started in September 2018, is shaped on learnings from our first experience in the country and continues to tackle needs at an individual, family and community level. This three-pronged strategy has been proven to be efficient and was well-accepted by the local community.

SOS Children’s Villages