Why Does Children’s Participation in Advocacy Matter?

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and its General Comment No 12 (2009) on the right of the child to be heard guide the activities of the Initiative for children in migration, including on child participation. According to article 12 of the UNCRC, all children have the right to be heard on all matters affecting them. The Initiative’s members have many years of practical experience in supporting children and young people’s participation within their projects and advocacy work and they aim to ensure that children’s views are being heard and taken into account in policy and project activities at all levels.

Children’s views should be seriously considered by adults so that they influence decisions affecting them in private and public spheres (e.g. in families, schools, communities, local governance, national policies and practices). Freedom to express their views without being judged and the importance of listening to other’s views is crucial for children. However this requires efforts to work with adults - whether they be parents, practitioners, caregivers, community leaders, decision or policy -makers or others - and with children and young people themselves to create the safe environment needed for them to share their opinions and feel respected.

Opportunities for children and young people to come together in groups with their peers and to provide space for them to share information, express their views, empower, engage with them and plan action on issues affecting them is one of the aims of the Initiative for children in migration. Participation of children and youth in advocacy enables them to acquire knowledge about power structures and ways to influence them, empowers them to impact policy-making processes, increases their self-confidence and develops their skills.

The 2030 Agenda and its SDGs recognise that children and young people are critical agents of change and will find in the new Goals a platform to channel their infinite capacities for activism into the creation of a better world. The New European Consensus on Development recognizes also young people as agents of development and change and as essential contributors to the 2030 Agenda. As implementing the SDGs and reviewing progress toward their achievement is strictly voluntary, children have an essential role in the delivery of Agenda 2030. Governments and civil society have a joint responsibility to create child friendly spaces and enable an inclusive environment where children are consulted on their needs, views and express their opinions and challenges.

Child participation is not an option, it is a right that must be respected and fulfilled.

Through the adoption of a comprehensive child-rights-based approach the Initiative for children in migration seeks to:

Promote children’s participation as a goal to increase fulfilment of children’s rights to participation and to promote children’s active role in society as societal actors, citizens and protagonists. Article 12 of the UNCRC is to be seen closely linked with other civil rights and freedoms including children’s rights to: freedom of expression (article 13), freedom of thought, conscience and religion (article 14), freedom of association and peaceful assembly (article 15), privacy (article 16) and information (article 17).
Promote children’s participation as guiding principle alongside other UNCRC principles concerning children’s rights to non-discrimination (article 2), best interests (article 3) and survival and development (article 6).
Promote children’s participation as a means for the delivery of the 2030 Agenda and its SDG-related goals and targets. Child participation will guarantee the continuity and increased impact of any progress to achieve the SDGs and strengthen the universal and inclusive nature of the SDGs to ensure no one is left behind.

Including children and youth voices in advocacy work is crucial to ensuring policies and practices reflect their needs, priorities and concerns. Children are right holders and through their participation, they can speak up about things that concern them and they can claim and defend their rights.

It is important to engage with children also as the societal and political actors that they are. However, children require more spaces and power to influence the decisions affecting them. The UNCRC recognizes children as right holders with civil rights and ncourages them to be protagonists by being aware of their rights, organising themselves, exercising their rights, representing themselves and participating in public decision-making.

How can we include the voice of children in advocacy?

Some important things to keep in mind when working with children, young people or youth-led initiative.

Inclusiveness: It is essential to establish ways to reach a goal through the dialogue as a joint activity, which consider the different experiences and interests of the youth your organisation is interacting with rather than providing a one fit-for-all type of framework. Collaborative participation built on nurturing a trustful partnership with children and youth is crucial.
Connecting with children and youth where they are: It is important to reach out with children and young people in their natural environment where they will tend to be the most comfortable to engage which can be their neighborhood, their school or hobby club.
Language: The choice of language used to communicate with children and youth is important in order to ensure access to information about their rights and other issues affecting them. An increased realization of their rights is equally important for the successful empowerment, participation and engagement of children in decisions affecting them. It is best to use a language that is age-appropriate, easily understandable and which allow children and young people to appreciate both the importance and the appeal of the issue.
Representation matters: In order to successfully engage with children and youth in the context of advocacy work, it is important to identify relevant demographic categories for a given young population which will best reflect the various needs, priorities and concerns of the entire group in question.
Creating spaces: It is important to ensure that children and young people have spaces and opportunities to initiate activities and advocate for themselves on issues affecting them.
Power dynamics: When supporting children’s participation, power relations between adults and children or youth and among children or youth themselves need to be considered.

Resources on child or youth participation

Destination Unknown’s Working in Partnership with Children and Young People on the Move: Strategies and Tools for Meaningful Participation
Youth advocacy toolkit: The Education We Want of the Youth Advocacy Group
Youth advocacy toolkit: Girls and Young Women’s Rights and the 2030 Agenda of the Girl’s Advocacy Alliance
Toolbox: An easy-to-use guide to consult with youth of the Slovak National Youth Council
UNICEF’s Youth Advocacy Toolkit
Save the Children’s So you want to consult with children? A toolkit of good practice
Youth Forum’s Structured Dialogue from A to Z. A toolkit for International Youth NGOs
Terre des Hommes’ Manual on children’s participation and Practical toolkit.
The Time to Talk Research toolkit which focusses specifically on child labour, of Terre des Hommes, Kindernothilfe and Save the Children Canada
Terre des Hommes Guidelines to Enhance Child Participation and Work with Youth on Child Advisory Boards of Terre des hommes

Youth-led initiatives:

The Living Together Initiative is co-led by Terre des Hommes and Rania Ali, a young Syrian social media journalist and migrant arrived in Europe in 2017, and supported by the Destination Unknown campaign and its partners. The Living Together Initiative aims at connecting migrant youth and youth from hosting communities and harnessing innovation and social change within youth in order to enhance global solidarity and local inclusion with the migration in the EU in the backdrop. The initiative creates opportunities for youth to freely express their opinions about living together with people from different origins, backgrounds and cultures. Their views and stories are shared on the Living Together website. Now more than ever, when the negative perception and wrong understanding of migration prevail in the public discourse, it is important to talk about communities living together in diversity.
Young, Paperless and Powerful (YPP), a creative group of young activists supported by Migrants Rights Center Ireland, campaigns for change for all young undocumented people living in Ireland.
Jügendliche ohne Grenzen (JOG) (Youth Without Borders) is a German nationwide association of young refugees and undocumented people founded in 2005. Their work follows the principle that those affected have their own voice. They organise an annual Youth Conference held in parallel to governments’ Conference of Interior Ministers. This conference is organized for and with young people affected by immigration procedures to inform about backgrounds of acquiescence, deportation and flight, to impart knowledge and above all to develop perspectives for a right to stay.
Brighter Futures London is a self-advocacy group of active young asylum seekers and refugees with roots in a variety of countries and continents who work together as a group to advocate for their rights as young asylum seekers and refugees. They challenge media narratives and raise awareness about the experiences and the obstacles they go through. They conduct research and speak at conferences, produce exhibitions and speak on the radio, and develop our leadership skills through training – and have fun!

Brighter Futures, a UK-based project which actively supports and works with young migrants, has developed several resources with and for migrant youth. The Migrant Hot Topics podcast puts forward the voices of young people as they openly speak about the realities and issues affecting young migrants living in London. They also developed an online well-being toolkit because young migrants experience complex mental health issues that affect many elements of their everyday lives. The toolkit aims to help them find ways to better cope with the symptoms they were experiencing.
Young, Paperless and Powerful (YPP), a creative group of young activists supported by Migrants Rights Center Ireland, campaigns for change for all young undocumented people living in Ireland. Through artistic media, such as a campaign video, YPP aims to raise awareness on the realities of children of undocumented migrants in Ireland and to strengthen their critical participation.
Hear Our Voices is a collection of powerful testimonies published by PICUM which shines light on the everyday realities of undocumented children and young people. It is available in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Ola is a romance webcomic based on real life stories of a teenage migrant girl living in London. It was produced by PositiveNegatives in collaboration with Let us Learn, Kids in Need of Defense UK and artist Asia Alfasi. They also produced the short video There Were Signs.
Becoming Adult aims to provide a better understanding of young migrants’ experiences in the UK as they transition to adulthood. The study involves young people from Albania, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Vietnam and is a project of the Economic & Social Research Council. The animation Dear Habib tells the experiences of a former unaccompanied seeking child.
The German book Zwischen Barrieren, Träumen und Selbstorganisation was written by children and youth in migration. It is an initiative of the self-organized youth-led organization Jugendliche Ohne Grenzen (Youth without Borders).

Resources made by children or youth

Resources made for children and youth

Explore, engage, act! of the Initiative for Child Rights in the Global Compacts. This publication is aimed at children and young people so that they know what the governments of the world have said they will do. As the Global Compacts can be difficult to read, it is a ‘child and youth friendly’ briefing to summarize what the Global Compacts say about migrant and refugee children and young people. The document explores ways for young people to engage in discussions around the Global Compacts and in putting them into practice and in checking on progress. It looks at ways in which children and young people might want to work with others and take action. Some inspiring examples of groups of young people who are doing a lot of work to support migrant and refugee children and youth have been included.