TeamUp: Ready? Go!

TeamUp is a psychosocial support intervention developed by War Child Holland, Save the Children Netherlands and UNICEF Netherlands to meet the urgent psychosocial needs of refugee children. Children are exposed to stress and traumatic experiences during their journeys to safety and often their social and emotional needs are not met – both during their journey and at their (temporary) destination. TeamUp is an inclusive psychosocial support group intervention with structured movement-based group activities based on play, movement, and body awareness for all children aged six to 18 years. TeamUp decreases stress and increases wellbeing. Over the past years, TeamUp has grown rapidly and has now developed a scaling strategy with the ambition to reach one million children by 2025.

With support from the DRA Innovation Fund, Save the Children, War Child Holland, Help a Child and SOS Children’s Villages Italy will be able to improve systems to allow for scaling TeamUp in South Sudan as well as the wider region. Therefore, this project aims to facilitate the development of a certification system for trainers and facilitators, improve MEAL processes and organize national and regional advocacy events to facilitate further expansion and embedding of TeamUp. This will allow TeamUp to be integrated into other programming in South Sudan, including the DRA South Sudan Joint Response, and eventually in the Sub Sahara African region. The project will increase local capacity for TeamUp with training and mentoring for trainers and facilitators. The MEAL component of the project is especially important, with a specific focus on testing and improving M&E processes to support cross-organisational data collection and learning.

Learn more about how TeamUp was integrated into the South Sudan JR, and how these experiences are used to scale the approach, here.