
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
CRCA/ECPAT Albania wishes you Seasons’ Greetings. We hope and wish for a new year with more optimism, better health for everyone and no poverty and violence against children.
This year, thanks to more than 1000 children and youth from all over Albania, we were able to work together to prepare A Child Rights Manifesto! Children and young people expect us to give them a world with no poverty, violence and discrimination, a better environment, with more opportunities for children and youth to speak and decide for themselves. We will strive in the years to come to make this a reality!
This year marks 25 years of our organisation. Being the first child and youth rights organisation in post-communist Albania, bears such a huge responsibility! Although we have made no plans so far, as Covid still influences most of our work, hopefully in the months to come we will see if an anniversary for such an important age may be organised.
We take pride that thanks to our Barnahus Albania and ISIGURT.AL (National Hotline for Internet Safety) we have saved more than 200 children from online and offline sexual violence, like no other institution or agency in Albania. Our Free Legal Aid Office has provided support to more than 300 children and young people in courts, prosecution offices or administrative cases. More than 2000 professionals, public officials, journalists, and CSO’s colleagues have contributed and benefited from our international and national trainings, workshops, and conferences on major issues such as: protection from sexual abuse, online safety for children and youth, juvenile justice, girls’ rights, foster care, child trafficking and victims’ rights. For the first time this year, we graduated 70 experts in our Professionals’ Academy on Child Protection from Sexual Abuse, who attended a 7-month course of learning and exchanging. Four major research-reports on child and youth rights were prepared and made public this year alone! During this year we were accepted as a full member of major networks such as Victims Europe and provisional full member of INHOPE, the largest network of internet hotlines in the World.
Finally, thanks to the support of UNDP Albania, and our cooperation with the business sector such as Balfin Group and ONE Communications, we were able to support with food packages, bags and school materials and warm clothes, at least 600 children, young people and single mothers living in extreme poverty across Albania, at least 20 of them victims of sexual violence, 50 young people with disability, and 10 LGBTI youth.
We would have never achieved this without the support of our partners and donors. We acknowledge the extraordinary support given to us from our private donors, UNDP Albania, ECPAT International, TLAS and EU in Albania, Albanian Media Institute, ACER, Hintovalon Foundation and Global Campaign for Education.
CRCA/ECPAT Team wishes you a great New Year!
Sincerely,
Altin Hazizaj
General Director,
Child Rights Centre Albania
CRCA/ECPAT ALBANIA