BARMM’s Regional Plan of Action for Children launched

COTABATO CITY — The Bangsamoro government launched the Regional Plan of Action for Children, a framework for more comprehensive child welfare programs in areas devastated by decades of secessionist strife, via a symbolic rite on Monday, November 4.

Officials of the Ministry of Social Services and Development-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, led by Minister Raissa Jajurie, officiated the launching of the Regional Plan of Action for Children (RPAC) at the Shariff Kabunsuan Cultural Complex inside the 32-hectare BARMM capitol in Cotabato City.

Jajurie told reporters then that the RPAC provides social workers in BARMM and cooperating communities with adequate child welfare and rights protection insights as guides in intensifying programs for children across the autonomous region.

BARMM covers three cities and five provinces, where some towns have just started reeling off from poverty and underdevelopment caused by a drawn-out Moro uprising for self-governance that waned only after the national government had forged separate peace compacts with the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.  

Organizers deliberately jibed the launching of the RPAC with Monday’s start of the nationwide observance of National Children’s Month.

Bangsamoro Labor Minister Muslimin Sema, whose office has foreign-assisted projects addressing child labor and the use of children as combatants, said on Tuesday that they shall support the implementation of the RPAC, drafted by planners and researchers in the MSSD-BARMM and in other regional agencies.

Officials of non-government humanitarian entities involved in the joint anti-child labor programs of the Ministry of Labor and Employment-BARMM and the International Labour Organization, which is an agency of the United Nations, also separately told reporters on Tuesday that they have committed support for RPAC’s application in all towns and cities in the autonomous region.