ABSTRACT
However, as the Project has shown, some key elements of the most innovative policies recur and suggest principles of broad applicability. The authors examine current knowledge in both industrialized and developing countries on the most effective interventions in the innercity areas and the consensus about what has proven most useful. In Kenya, where church and NGO programmes for children and adolescents are more prevalent, few programmes were specifically targeted on adolescent mothers and even fewer were community-based, despite the documented increases in the incidence of adolescent pregnancies. The importance of prevention cum protection that is, reaching urban children in distress before they engage in high-risk behaviours has been discovered as they have seen over and over again by large developmental urban NGOs concerned with children. The long-term advantages of family preservation in terms of cost-effectiveness are clear and their replicability has been confirmed, but research still needs to elicit documented answers to issues of long-term sustainability, tied to problems of recidivism.
