Caring for the Caregiver

A growing body of evidence has shown that caregivers’ own mental health, and well-being impacts their ability to provide nurturing care. Preventive support for caregivers’ mental health is key to promoting optimal child development especially in resource-constrained settings where caregivers face multiple stressors with limited support.

In response, UNICEF in collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) and WHO, developed the Caring for the Caregiver (CFC) package. CFC aims to build front-line workers’ capacity to provide adequate counselling and parenting support services that improve caregivers’ emotional well-being and their social support to enable nurturing care for improved child development outcomes. More specifically, CFC uses a family centered approach to respond to the most common emotional and social caregiving challenges and develops frontline workers’ skills to support caregivers increase their confidence, strengthen their stress management and self-care skills, and identify sources of support. The package is gender-sensitive and accompanied by an adolescent supplement to address the unique challenges of adolescent caregivers.

The CFC approach has been co-created with country experts and stakeholders over a period of several years. The package materials have been through a series of technical peer reviews alongside testing, adaptation, and validation in 6 countries - Bhutan, Brazil, Rwanda, Serbia, Sierra Leone, and Zambia. The evidence-based package, downloadable here, contains an overview guide, an adaptation guidebook, a training of trainer’s manual, and supervision and implementation materials. Materials will also be available in Arabic, French, and Spanish. Please reach out to UNICEF HQ to access these resources.

CFC is a UNICEF copyrighted intervention and can only be used or adapted, in full or in part, with permission and guidance from the developers. Training and implementation materials (i.e., facilitators guide, supervision workbook, activity cards, job aids) can be shared upon request.