Child services needs funding

THE Child and Family Services is facing funding problems to deliver its mandated services, acting director Simon Yanis, pictured, says.
The office comes under the Department of Religion, Youth and Community Development.
Yanis told The National that the Lukautim Pikinini Act 2015 required a lot of capacity building.
“The enforcement of that law depends on the capacity of the office and at the moment we have been building that,” he said.
“Thanks to the Government, we have a separate funding and budget allocation.
“We have been waiting to do this job.”
Yanis said the office had proposed 63 positions to the Department of Personnel Management.
“I have submitted a proposal to the department to recruit child protection officers. It’s not to say that we haven’t done anything with the street kids. We have trained our child protection officers (on that) in NCD, Motu-Koita and Central.”
Yanis said the office has different programme components including child protection, early childhood development, council management and case management data base and administrative support services.
“We are temporarily housed at the department but we have requested for office space through the central office allocation committee,” he said.
“Once the 63 positions are filled, then our status would be upgraded. We will be a fully-fledged organisation and we may even have our own minister.”