Human Development Resource Centre (HDRC)
Research --- Service --- Consultancy
Background
The HDRC is an equal
opportunity facility registered in 1995 in Cameroon for research and service
on lifespan human development, with special focus on the next generations –
children and youth. Today’s young people,
who constitute over 60% of the population in much of Africa, are tomorrow’s citizens, leaders and competitors in a
turbulent globalized world of cyberspaces, ICTs and more. They are Africa’s
fragile bridge into an uncertain future, who require
support.
The
HDRC blends knowledge and skills from triangulation of the
methodologies of the social, behavioral, health and educative sciences into
understanding and intervening Africa’s theory of the universe, human embedding
in African contexts, and the participative processes of Africa’s timeless
traditions and current realities.
Conspicuous in sub-Saharan Africa
by its virtual scarcity are centres of excellence in
human resources development. Our long-term goal is to evolve the HDRC into a
Centre of Excellence for Human Services
Psychology to add value to Africa’s huge
but underutilized human resources.
Our efforts are to understand and enhance the strengths and positive elements
of Africa’s rich heritages; with particular
focus of research and service on the life courses of youngsters and the strategies they deploy to navigate their difficult life
circumstances.
A Strategic Statement
HDRC is not a grant-awarding institution; it is a
grant-seeking facility. Aware of their considerable but underused talents and
skills, the founders of the HDRC initiated the laborious
process of institutional building with start-off contributions from their
meager resources, ready to compete for research/project grants and to seek
donor charities and donations from the generous spirit of the donor and
development communities.
Mission Statement
The
mission of the HDRC is to generate evidence-based data on which to mount
advocacy and interventions to advance the well-being and social competencies of
Africa’s youngsters in their families, schools, communities, peer cultures,
etc. and to add value to Africa’s social
capital. The vision is to bolster the innate human ability to learn and become
competent and responsible in the mastery of life circumstances and effective
management of such developmental transitions as family formation, labor market
entry and effectiveness, and the challenges and schisms of competitive market
forces, social mobility, ICTs, and local versus
global factors.
Objectives
The HDRC seeks to:
- Understand and enhance child and youth
development in a hybrid Africa.
- Offer assistance and guidance to orphaned and indigent
schoolchildren.
- Generate contextually and culturally apt
knowledge and products for Africa’s / Cameroon’s
needs in a globalized world, with keen attention
to re-education and innovative technologies in agrarian and vocational
productivity.
- Provide leadership and mentorship in psychology
and allied fields.
- Advocate, network, and compete for institutional
and societal development funding and knowledge dissemination.
- Develop and mature the HDRC into an African
Centre of Excellence in Human Services Psychology.
Pilot Intervention Sites
Kitiwum in the Kumbo Central
Council and Nkwen in Bamenda
Three Council in northwest Cameroon
are HDRC’s pilot sites. They represent, respectively,
rural and urban communities, with discernible dichotomies that reflect the core
features of rural and urban settings in sub-Saharan Africa/Cameroon.
Networking and Partnering
The HDRC seeks and has established productive,
collaborative networks at local, national, and international levels for
partnership in capacity building and institutional and societal development. A Board of Directors and an
International Advisory Board sustain the HDRC
HDRC Program Areas
I. Orphaned and Indigent Schoolchildren Assistance and
Guidance
We
are aware that USD 50.00 can pay the school fees and provide basic school needs
to a child for one academic year. We are equally aware of the significant
percentage of children who cannot obtain basic education because they languish
in poverty or are orphaned and no one is available or
ready to support their primary education. This program seeks to identify such
children, establish their needs and offer supportive assistance and guidance to
them.
II. Enhancing Positive Human Development (EPHD)
The program focus is on positive human
development but with special attention on three components, namely, early
childhood development, youth development, and health psychology.
Early
Childhood Development Component (ECD): As a significant entry point for progress with
education, economic and social development, early childhood care and education
(ECCE) is increasingly being recognized as an
important strategy to achieve poverty reduction goals. Families, communities
and nations differ in capacity and commitment to it, but usually to the
detriment of children and women in general and the girl child and her mother in
particular. The goal of this program is to undertake research to illumine the
provision of services to give “a good start in life involving nurturing, care
and a safe environment” (African Ministers of Education, 2005) to children 0-8
years through evidence-based interventions with children, their families and
other ECCE stakeholders in Africa/Cameroon. The bulk of ECCE caregivers and
practitioners in Cameroon
are untrained, while parents are confused about which values to follow in caregiving and guidance of their children. The HDRC
partners with Dr. Marc Bornstein at the U.S. NICHD [http://www.cfr.nichd.nih.gov/growing.html]
on mother-infant interaction studies, with Professor Alan Pence at the Early
Childhood Development Virtual University [www.ecdvu.org] on
ECCE services, and Professor Kofi Marfo
at the Center for Research on Children’s Development
& Learning (CRCDL) of the University of South Florida (http://www.coedu.usf.edu/crcdl)
Africa-centric research.
Youth
Development Component (YDC): The
purpose of this program is to understand and generate local knowledge, products
and services for children and youth, with the objective of improving the rich
heritage and local knowledge and practices related thereto. Reproductive and
spiritual health is a key concern of this program. The goal is to equip
children and youth with knowledge and life skills to understand and cope with
their sexuality/spirituality and to visualize and gain from the challenges of
adulthood, work life and citizenship. The HDRC is a partner on
research on spiritual development during adolescence with the Search Institute
of Minneapolis in the U.S.
(See: www.spiritualdevelopmentcenter.org).
Health
Psychology Component (HPC): Human
health is context-bound. It entails an experienced reality and considerable
cultural and power differentials between client and practitioner. Most national
health systems in Africa have adopted the
models of global health to the apparent neglect of “the people’s medicine” (ethnomedicine). Inherent conflict exists in both the
biomedical (modern) and ethnomedical (traditional)
systems of health care. This program seeks to understand this tension, with the
objective of strengthening the psychology (the human factor) of health care
systems through capacity building and promotion of constructive dialogue and
respectful inter-system learning. The focus is on endemic childhood diseases
(HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea, etc.), and adolescent reproductive
health.
III: Workforce Preparation and Productivity
Enhancement (WPPE)
Most African youngsters,
especially Cameroonians, are at heightened risk because they are idle. Hundreds
of thousands of young people are unemployed and many are on the street or in
more risky spaces; their formal education did not prepare them as job creators
nor exploiter of their rich natural environments. Thus, aware
of the poor work ethic and entrepreneurial deficiencies in the general
population and young people in particular, the HDRC has designed this program
to re-orient youth into responsible and productive values for effective and
productive entry or re-insertion into the workforce through knowledge and
skills training in assorted vocational fields – ICTs,
dressmaking, home décor and domestic appliances, craftwork, carpentry, etc. –
in partnership with local apprenticeship facilities and agencies. Considering the poor and declining work habits in the public and
private sectors in Africa in general and Cameroon in particular as well as the
lack of the ability for self-employment and productive work life, the program
also intends to mount Vocational Training to ‘re-educate’ and re-insert both employers and
employees and the jobless into productive values and practical skills of Project Making and Management and Human Services Psychology that underlie
customer satisfaction, successful entrepreneurship, and profitable investment.
Training is community-oriented and focuses on the
clientele, product consumers, vulnerable children/youth, fragile
families/communities and the civil society at large.
Its aim is to envision projects and services that can rekindle and bolster
positive work ethic, customer satisfaction, agricultural production,
psychological sense of community, and the family-community frontline responses
through income generating activities (IGA) and other solidarity/coping
strategies. It seeks to support and strengthen family, community, and civil
society initiatives in participative self-improvement and community change
processes. The training extends to innovative lay/peer counselling.
The aim of the lay and peer counsellor
training track is to creatively equip civil society, especially young people
with simplified counselling knowledge,
people-oriented sensitivity, life skills and techniques to prepare and dispense
service projects for peasant farmers, psychosocial and spiritual support to the
needy, especially the stigma and discrimination suffered by the disabled, the
elderly, and HIV/AIDS infected and affected persons.
IV. Education Development and Travel Advisement (EDTA)
The program is
designed to understudy, track and advocate the relevance or irrelevance
of educational provisions and career development. It seeks to discover,
generate or create ‘new’ knowledge/products that address problems in practice
in Africa’s education in the context of
agrarian livelihoods. This involves understanding knowledge that may be
universal but that is relevant and usefully applicable in local contexts as
well as the tensions between the pedagogies of the school and the participative
pedagogies of education in African family traditions. The six
components of this initiative include: (i) upgrading
the capacity and relevance of educational institutions, (ii) time management
and cost-effective learning strategies, (iii) educational advisement and
guidance for effective academic performance and suitable career maturity and
vocational entry, (iv) individual / group counselling,
(v) development and publication of Africa-Sensitive textbooks and tools, based
on African
Book Orientation Statement,
and (vi) educational counselling and travel guidance
and advisement.
Major Project Profiles
Since 2009: Teacher Education Textbooks
and Tools Development Initiative for Africa.
The first volume has been sponsored by a Jacobs Foundation
grant to produce an edited volume entitled: African Educational
Theories and Practices: A Generative Teacher Education
Textbook. The
project year is July 2009-June 2010.
Textbook
orientation statement
Minutes
of authors’ meeting, Aug. 7-8, 2009
1998-2008: Longitudinal Study of Infant Development and Nso
Mother-Infant Interaction: Physical interactions are important to the
development, health, and well-being of children, but levels and types of these
interactions differ cross-culturally. This project was a collaborative
cross-cultural study of mother-infant interaction with the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda,
Maryland, U.S.
and involved videotaping first-born babies at home in interaction with their Nso mothers at age 5 months and 20 months. The findings of
this study have been presented at conferences.
2003-2006: Adolescent Development and Participation Program: The
HDRC was the focal point for this UNICEF Cameroon program for the North West
Region. It was a youth program designed to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS
through peer education and life skills. An example of a training workshop
follows.
1993-Date: Lay Counsellor
Training Program (LCTP). The LCTP developed in response to specific
needs of a faith-based organization (FBO), the Catholic Diocese of Kumbo, whose Family Life Office (FLO) recorded an alarming
number of HIV/AIDS cases in the Christian community (Lukong,
1994) and began to develop an outreach program in 1993 with a clear mission to
educate the community and empower it to support and care for victims of the
lethal disease.
Early attempts met with difficulty because church personnel lacked the
knowledge to develop an AIDS care curriculum so they consulted and sought
partnership with a psychologist, the director of the HDRC. Together, the FLO
and the HDRC initiated the faith-based LCTP. The
HDRC assisted with the elaboration of the program curriculum and participated
in the Kumbo Diocesan program from 1993-2006 and the Bamenda Arch-Diocesan program from 1997 until date. It
began as an education and counsellor training
program for the Catholic community, particularly those individuals living with
HIV/AIDS and their families.
The initial target population was the
Catholic HIV/AIDS community but we learned two important lessons from the
outset. First, focusing on Catholics only was not only seen
as restrictive because Catholic Christians had non-Catholics are family members
and friends. Second, naming the program HIV/AIDS counsellor
training would have hyped the HIV/AIDS stigma and
would have discouraged many people identifying with it. In consideration
thereof, we designated it LCTP for terminal disease counselling.
There are no religious barriers to trainee selection into the program.
The LCTP is an
ongoing partnership program run by the Catholic Diocese of Kumbo
and the Arch-Diocese of Bamenda
for all interested youth and adults of any religion wherein staff of the HDRC
are resource partners. It trains civil society members from all walks of life selected from religious congregations,
villages, and health institutions as lay counsellors
for terminally ill persons, with special focus on psychosocial support to and
home care of persons affected by HVI/AIDS.
1994-1996: Risk perception of AIDS/STD's, unintended pregnancy, and prevention
behaviors among adolescent students in northwest Cameroon. This was an inaugural project
for the HDRC. It was Young Investigator Grant by the Johann Jacobs Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland
to the Founder/Director. The obtained a huge dataset on Cameroonian youth
attitudes to HIV/AIDS and perceived risks to unintended pregnancy and STDs. The
most surprising finding was that youth were ignorant about several aspects of
their reproductive health and their parents did not perceive their parents as
helpful. This dataset has served as baseline knowledge for many of the Centre’s program and services, particularly the Lay Counsellor Training Program in which it partners with the
Catholic Dioceses of Kumbo (1993-2006) and Bamenda (1997 and ongoing).
HDRC Experts
Prof. A. Bame Nsamenang, Prof. Therese M. Tchombe,
Dr. Martyn Sama, Mr. Emmanuel
Fomba, Mrs. Gladys Ngoran,
Mrs. Pascaline J. Fai, Mrs.
Mairama Ngeh, Mrs. Florence
Yuyen, Ms. Eunice Adzemye,
Ms. Rose Ndonka, Ms. Sheri Nsamenang,
Messieurs Kevin Njodzeka, Cornelius Wirsungnin, Prof. George Brannen,
Wiiba Carolyn Brannen, and
Mr. Jeanmarie Suuynyuy.
HDRC International Advisory Board
Profs.: Thérèse Tchombe (Cameroon), Pierre R. Dasen
(Switzerland), George Brannen (U.S.), Alan Pence
(Canada), Kofi Marfo
(Ghana/U.S.), Anne Petersen (U.S.), Charles Super (U.S.), Sara Harkness (U.S.), Michael Lamb (U.K.), Rainer Silbereisen (Germany), Marc Bornstein (U.S.), Patrice Engle
(U.S.), and Gustav Jahoda (Scotland).