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II. “To change the world with children”
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989 by
the UN General Assembly and coming into force a year later, profoundly
changed the world’s engagement with children. Like the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the Convention articulated
something fundamental about humanity’s sense of itself and
acted as a watershed and reference point for future generations.
It presented a coherent vision of children’s rights and how
society should provide for them – expressing it in the terms
of a legal document, and asking national governments to sign up
to those terms and thereafter be held accountable for them.
Seen
through the Convention’s lens, the child is an active and
contributing member of a family, community and society. Children’s
participation changes thinking and alters the design of projects
and programmes. Yet the systematic soliciting of children’s
and adolescents’ opinions has until now been rare. So, in
an attempt to garner their views in a more systematic way, UNICEF
embarked on a series of regional youth opinion polls, with the
long-term aim of constructing a database that will help the organization
evaluate whether children’s rights are being respected.
Governments must find ways of taking more serious account of
the views of children – and of adolescents in particular.
The proliferation of youth parliaments, for example, is an important
development. Some of the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe
and the Commonwealth of Independent States – notably Albania,
Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova – are blazing
a trail in this regard. In Africa, too, children’s parliaments
have been launched in one form or another in nearly every country
on the continent.
The Global Movement for Children
Six leading organizations that work with children – the
Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, Netaid.org Foundation,
PLAN International, Save the Children, UNICEF and World Vision
– announced their commitment to build a Global Movement for
Children. This worldwide movement aims to draw in all those who
believe that the rights of children must be a first priority:
from caring parents to government ministers, from responsible
corporations to teachers and child protection officers. It is
a movement that is gathering the kind of momentum and moral force
that politicians will ignore at their peril. In all its aspects
– including the fact that children are full and necessary
partners – the Global Movement for Children is about leadership.
 The
Global Movement for Children has mobilized support all over the
world for a 10-point agenda that aims to “change the world
with children”, moving into villages, towns and cities in
a massive grass-roots campaign. Young and old alike have been
asked to ‘Say Yes for Children’. The same challenge
is posed on the Internet as people log on to www.gmfc.org
and offer their pledge. The website was set up and maintained
by the Netaid.org Foundation – itself a joint public-private
venture between the UN Development Programme and Cisco Systems
of the kind the Global Movement aims to inspire – and which
World Vision, another founding partner of the Global Movement
for Children, is making a particular effort to promote.
The national launches of ‘Say Yes for Children’ all
over the world beginning in March 2001 were spectacular for both
their diversity and their high profile: Presidents and prime ministers,
musical and sports celebrities, religious leaders and writers
joined forces with thousands of children and adolescents –
all with a shared agenda – “to change the world with
children.”
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