With AICS, Vis and Cuamm, psychosocial support for 4000 children in Ukraine

Barbara is a ten-year-old girl living in a village in the northern part of Dnipropetrovsk, a city located in the eastern part of northern Ukraine. Like many other Ukrainian students, Barbara's school attendance has been limited due to the Covid-19 pandemic at first, and now because of the war.

One of the worst consequences for her has been the inability to interact with her peers: although she enjoyed going to school, over the past few years, Barbara has struggled to relate to other children, and her natural shyness and reserve have turned into silence and isolation.

Concerned about her cognitive development and psychological well-being, her parents decided to enrol her in a community centre, one of the few social venues still active in the village, where children can participate in extracurricular activities and recreational classes. To improve her communication skills, Barbara was included in a series of meetings and play groups aimed at strengthening the social abilities of the participants. The community centres, activated or supported by AVSI in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, have been created with the goal of supporting children by offering them a space where they can feel safe and express their emotions.

 Barbara's parents claim to have seen an improvement in their daughter after just a few months of attendance in the centre, as she emerged from the silence in which she had taken refuge, becoming more self-confident and socially proactive. At the centre, she managed to create new friendships and spaces of normality in a daily life marked by war.

Through the SAFE project, AVSI and the partners VIS and Doctors with Africa - CUAMM actively collaborate to support the activities of the community centres and offer 4,000 students and their teachers an inclusive, safe, and stimulating environment, where, in addition to lessons, they can participate in recreational activities and receive psychological support, in the areas of Dnipropetrovska, Donetsk, and Zaporizka. The project, funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), began in February 2024 and is expected to continue until February 2025.