Keep Girls Safe

ADRA Thailand’s Keep Girls Safe project (KGS) aims to work on trafficking prevention of girls (mainly hill-tribe girls) and offers a safe house/shelter opportunity for those girls where prevention comes too late and who are in urgent need for a safe place to stay. Many of them have no mother and/or father anymore. The shelter is located in Chiang Rai city and the KGS community oriented prevention activities are conducted among communities within districts of Chiang Rai province. These trafficking prevention activities are including community awareness raising and capacity building for community members and village leaders, Peer Educator trainings for young girls, establishment of girls clubs at schools plus out-reach activities for awareness raising in target communities, introducing a ‘watch dog’ system in communities as an early warning system, networking with partner organizations and working with local authorities to help establishing or improving systems and policies that will ensure proper trafficking prevention and enforces child protection in the concerned districts and communities.

The KGS project started in 2004 and will go in its third phase for a budgeted 3 year period from July 2009 to June 2012. During the past years this project has been constantly developing and gained a good reputation within the NGO network community and local authorities of Chiang Rai province and will continue to assist at-risk girls through the mentioned approaches above.
The estimated beneficiaries of this new three-year project phase are as follows:

• Up to 30 girls at the shelter
• Up to 80 girls within the educational assistance program
• At least 60 girls within the Peer Educators training program
• At least 300 girls within the girls clubs and receive different trainings and capacity building
• At least 6,000 community members and guardians involved and targeted on awareness-raising about trafficking and vocational / financial planning trainings.

The main goal of this project is to reduce the vulnerability of girls to trafficking and sexual abuse and exploitation within the targeted communities and offer a safe house / shelter for girls at very high risk as a last refuge opportunity.