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Recommendations and Enhancement Measures after the Review of the Child Development Fund Programme

The Social Welfare Department (SWD) has completed the overall review of the Child Development Fund (CDF) Programme. The findings of the review have been endorsed by the Steering Committee on the Child Development Fund. The recommendations and enhancement measures are as follows:

  1. Target Participants
    1. Positioning the target participants of CDF Programme to Primary 3 to Primary 6 students to enable the underprivileged children to benefit from the Programme, including character building and development of positive attributes, values and saving habits, at an early developmental stage.
  2. Three Key Components

    Target Savings
    1. Maintaining the current requirement of target savings for mentees of $200 per month and up to $4,800 for two years;
    2. Imposing additional requirements for participants as a pre-requisite for release of the Government's matching fund, such as satisfactory attendance in core programmes and activities organised by operators, and formulation of a preliminary Personal Development Plans (PDPs) under the guidance of the mentor, in order to strengthen mentees' learning motivation.
    PDP
    1. Advancing the disbursement of the mentees' target savings (including monthly savings, matching contribution and Government financial incentive) of the first year to the 13th month of the project at the earliest to allow sufficient time for the mentees to implement the PDPs progressively under the supervision of mentors.
    Mentorship
    1. Strengthening support and training for mentors through enhancing the train-the-trainer programmes for CDF operators to address the needs of mentors;
    2. Advancing the training for mentors and parents/guardians to complete three out of five core training programmes in the first year of the project so that the parents/guardians and mentors could better support the mentees to implement their PDPs.
  3. Project Duration
    1. Maintaining the project duration of three years;
  4. "One-plus-one-approach" and Target Number of Participants of each Project
    1. The operators of both NGO-led and school-based projects are allowed to apply for either a single three-year project or two consecutive three-year projects under the "one-plus-one-approach" in each application; and
    2. Relaxing the threshold of the target number of participants for both the NGO-led and school-based projects to allow more flexibility to the operators in planning and implementation of the Programme. The minimum number of participants is 25 while the maximum is 100 (with a flexibility of maximum 15% upward adjustment)

The SWD has adopted the above recommendations and enhancement measures and is preparing to launch the 10th batch of school-based projects and NGO-led projects in the first quarter of 2024. Interested primary schools and non-governmental organisations will be invited to submit proposals by then. For enquiries, please contact the CDF Office at 2892 5540.

9 February 2024