The Community Based Rehabilitation Approach: A Case Study Of The St. John's Community Centre, Pumwani

Abstract

The study focused on the Community Based Rehabilitation Approach as used by the St. John's Community Centre to address the needs of its recipients in the Pumwani administrative division. As the name suggests, the Community Based Rehabilitation Approach involved the empowering of vulnerable children at the community level, while at the same time exploring all possibilities of empowering their families to carry out their responsibilities of bringing up children. The approach designed strategies that enhanced the capacity of communities: families and children cope with the conditions that contribute to the movement of the children from homes to the streets. It addressed the familial, situational, economic and psychosocial factors that predisposed the children to street life involvement. The broad objective of the research was to evaluate the Community Based Rehabilitation Approach used by riie St John's Community Centre. The specific objectives were: to study and understand the content of the approach, to assess the implementation strategy of the approach, to establish challenges faced by the approach and record the measures against these challenges and lastly to collect and compile the stakeholders' perception in regard to the outcome of the community based rehabilitation program. The theories that informed this research were Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism theory and Adele Clarke's situational analysis theory. The research used the purposive sampling technique and a total of 50 respondents were interviewed. The main sources of data were secondary and primary. Secondary data was from: Books. Journals. Websites, Research reports and other projects running community based rehabilitation programs while the primary data was from direct observation. Interviews and the Focus Group Discussions. From the findings, a majority of the children (75%) stated that they were using their leisure