A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed last Friday will pave the way to strengthen referral pathways for children accessing services at safe house often with their mothers experiencing family and sexual violence. In a small yet significant ceremony, Office of the Child and Family Services with Consultative Implementation and Monitoring Council’s Family and Sexual Violence Action Committee (CIMC/FSVAC) signed the strategic instrument to better assist women and children in safe houses. Under the MOU, the two partners will deliver key trainings to empower and upskill safe house workers majority of whom are volunteers for a period of 12 months. The MoU was signed by OCFS deputy director and program coordinator, Mr Otto Trur, CIMC executive officer Mrs Wallis Yakam and FSVAC National Coordinator Marcia Kalinoe in Port Moresby. This symbolic event also marked the conclusion of a three-day Volunteer Child Protection training for 15 frontline workers who came from safe houses in Port Moresby, Lae and Goroka particularly from the House of Hope, Lifeline, Foursquare, City Mission, Adventist Workers and Femili PNG. The partnership will bring together like minded partners to train the safe house staff on Lukautim Pikinini Act (LPA) and Community Child Protection Volunteers (CCPV), Early Child Care Development (ECCD), Emergency Response on Children, Child Protection Case Management, refresher training for Child Protection Officers (CPOs) in the safe house pilot provinces, Entry Point of a Survivor and Primero (an open-source software system designed to help GBV and Child Protection service providers securely and safely collect, store, manage, and share data) training. CIMC Executive Officer Wallis Yakam was grateful to the government for partnering with civil society actors to improve access to support services for Gender Based Violence (GBV) survivors. “We are achieving extra milestones by equipping you with extra skills, hopefully this training extents to other centers. We need partnerships and collaboration among likeminded organisations such as this as, the problem is too big for anyone organization to deal with”, Mrs Yakam said. “How do we move forward, one of them is the laws that we have and the referral pathways” “Many of our survivors do not know where to start in terms of reporting, some of them are scared and traumatized”. “So we have to put in more awareness of the referral pathways that we develop, so that entry point has to be made aware to survivors and everybody out there”. Mr Trur explained that for Lukautim Pikinini Act 2015 and other relevant Acts to be fully implemented thus “we need to train our officers especially the child protection officers as well as partners and child protection volunteers”. Given that International day of Disability Mr Trur acknowledge that LPA 2015 covers provisions on children with disability and that Community Child Protection Volunteer (CCPV) are trained on this aspect.