Chisinau City Hall and UNICEF launched a campaign to recruit professional parental assistants
More than 100 children left without parental protection are waiting to be placed in families in Chisinau, including refugee children and teenagers from Ukraine. In order to raise awareness and recruit professional parental assistants, Chisinau City Hall and UNICEF launched a campaign under the banner "Change a child's life, become a professional parental assistant".
110 children who are in foster care centres are waiting to be placed in families in the municipality of Chisinau. Currently, 29 professional parental assistants are employed to educate 27 children. Within this project, the authorities propose to employ 20 more professional parental assistants.
"If at the beginning of 2022, we had 33 parental assistants, now we have 29. This shows us that we are decreasing, but we do not stop here, this is also the goal of our project to strengthen and develop this service", says the representative of the Municipal Directorate of Alternative Care and Adoption, Olga Zaharia.
Professional parenting assistants can be married or single people who have experience in raising children. Their salary varies between 6,500 lei and 8,900 lei, to which are added the monthly allowances for the children.
"It is important to offer support and protection to children in difficulty, but also to their families. It is important to have alternative care services, which are closer to the family environment", says Vice Mayor Angela Cutasevici.
"There are children who do not have care due to violence and family misunderstandings, so the family lives separately, and the children do not feel the love of both parents. Only in 2021, more than 32,000 separated children were registered in the Republic of Moldova. In 2022, this risk has increased even more", says the representative of UNICEF in the Republic of Moldova, Ilija Talev.
The value of the project is 50 million lei. Chisinau City Hall allocated 28 million lei, and the rest of the amount is the contribution of the UNICEF representation in the Republic of Moldova.
