This edition looks at interconnections between education and power. Articles cover: accountability of schools to communities, primary education for working children in India, theatre for development, participatory planning using Planning For Real, REFLECT, disability, gender, and more.
Chapter 3 reviews literature on projects aiming at aducational change and the processes of their scaling up. After defining terms and examining the aims and process of educational change, the chapter looks at model from different projects in Indonesia and China. Chapter 4 reviews the development of the child-to-child approach, various degrees of children's participation and issues of going to scale.
This article aims to give a global overview of children's share in the democratic process. Particular attention is paid to street children and working children, key contempory thought on the involvement of children is discussed, and the emergence of children's municipal councils reviewed.
Initiated by Save the Children (UK) and the National Council for Child and Youth Development, this report aims to present experiences from the Youth Against AIDS Project, in Ban Pang Lao. The project has involved many groups including youth groups, youth volunteers against AIDS, housewives groups, village groups, the committee for the Prevention of AIDS and teachers from Ban Pang Lao village and from other schools. The report aims to disseminate what has been learnt from the study, so that it can be discussed and exchanged and used for the benefit of people working in the field of AIDS prevention and care.
A kit book produced by a group of youth who did an evaluation of a youth Drop-In Centre in Downtown Ottawa. They put this kit together to help street youth evaluate their services. It's a youth friendly kit, therefore it's easy to follow and understand. In this kit there are seven phases. Each phase demonstrates how ideas were brainstormed, put together and used as a tool in evaluation.
SCF carried out research on the situation of working children in rural areas of Vietnam. The research was largely based on information collected directly from children who participated in the data gathering process. They covered likes and dislikes for types of work, education, household, wages, accidents, abuse, poverty, migration and the effects of economic reform. The research showed the extent of child labour in Vietnam, the wide diversity of work done and the role children's work plays in household production. It failed to explore children's own coping mechanisms and survival strategies. "The research team still perceived children as helpless victims in need of protection rather than as social actors in their own right.... Children's own strategies offer points of departure for developing more effective approaches to address the rights of working children".
This video records a step in the process of opening up cities to children's participation in assessing and improving the urban environment. It records the firs-ever workshop in South Africa at which children from a Johannesburg squatter camp join urban policy makers and planners, NGOs and donor agencies to discuss problem areas in their lives and how these could be improved.
This report is about young people leaving care in Hull and was researched and put together by young people themselves. Some themes which emerged in the research, such as the need for practical and emotional support, crop up throughout the report. The introduction explains why the research was done and the Hull context. After the key findings, an outline of how the research was done and responses from the interviewers, the next sections look at topics emergeing from the respondents: leaving care, support, money, accomodation, health, police, life now, the future and the need for change.
This essay seeks to address three questions: (1) what gender related issues do primary school students identify as problems for themselves in the school context, (2) why do we need to ask the child for their viewpoint, (3) and how can we effectively hear the voice of the child? By describing the student as subject, object, and participant, the author seeks to listen to year 6 primary school students' views on gender as an issue that affects them in the school context. The methodological approach used draws on PRA techniques and maintains that the subject/participant is the best person to identify the problems they experience as well as recommend practical and effective solutions to the problems they identified.
This document is a proposal by ActionAid and ProNet to add a child focus to the REFLECT process, a participatory approach to literacy and numeracy acquisition which has been geared to adults. The proposed location of the REFLECT youth club pilot program is the Dangme West District in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The goal is to help school and non-school going children to develop basic literacy and numeracy skills in their mother tongue and empower them to create social change. The proposal provides a detailed look at the program objectives, logistics, facilitation, implementation, and strategy.
This article compares two examples of participatory research with and by children, based on groups in both the United Kingdom and Bangladesh. It focuses on children and young people conducting their own research, from design through to analysis and recommendations. In the UK, the focus of the children was on the experiences and issues of young people leaving the care of local authorities, while the children in Bangladesh focused their participatory research on the issues in the lives of street children. Whilst the environments and life circumstances of the two groups were different there were many striking similarities such as discrimination by the general public, difficulties with the police, low income and issues around access to education.
This paper examines children's rights, sustainability, citizenship, and work using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as the basis of discussion. Specifically, it critically analyses the three Ps that make up the convention - Protection, Provision, and Participation and looks at the inequalities that exist in how various countries address children's rights.
This paper discusses the political participation of children. It explores three main questions: why do we need to talk about children's political participation; what sort of political participation is required, and; how can it be achieved? It does this by looking at adult visions of children and young people, the idea of citizenship which currently excludes children and young people, and asks what is actually meant by political participation and how children can be included in it.
This document is a chapter from a book titled "Resident Involvement and Community Action". The chapter looks at the involvement of younger residents in community action, and starts by examining this in the context of the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child. It goes on to look at children and young people's needs and perspectives, explores some key principles and methods of participation and looks at examples where children have participated. It concludes that planning activities rarely consult children, yet their inclusion in resident participation brings benefits for all involved.
This is a handbook that discusses the Childscope approach in Ghana, which aims to improve primary education, enrolment, and attendance (particularly by girls). It offers a guide of how to do this through the use of participatory, school and community-based approaches. It gives descriptions of processes used to enhance community participation, teacher development, health promotion, networking and capacity building, as well as practical experiences from the Childscope project in the Afram plains, advice to practitioners based on lessons learnt there, and references for further information.