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Recently I wrote about the training we did in Papua New Guinea to build children’s participation in projects supported by ChildFund. So why is child participation important? To answer this question, we first need to look at why child poverty exists.

Broadly, child poverty exists (in PNG, Australia, everywhere) because people lack assets – human, financial, natural and social assets. By that we mean they do not have access to healthcare, education, financial resources, productive land and clean water. And many times they live in places that have lost a sense of community and mutual support, which is what we mean by “social” assets.

But this is not the whole story. There are three further underlying causes, important causes – because history, and ChildFund’s own research, has shown that simply building assets around poor people does not provide enduring escapes from poverty. ChildFund demonstrated this in 2003 when we carried out an in-depth study of this issue across five very different countries.

In our globalised, warming world, in which risks from climate change, violent conflict, child trafficking, sex tourism and so forth are growing rapidly, protection has become a significant focus for many international organisations, including ChildFund. We see child protection as fundamental for overcoming poverty in the long run, in part because risks – to children’s health, safety, environment, opportunities – are growing so quickly.

The third cause of child poverty that we have identified is that power imbalances continue across the world. This relative lack of power is seen within families (related to gender, disability, etc.), within communities (related to ethnicity, caste, class, gender, disability, etc.) and between nations (some countries have less power than others in today’s world order). This unjust situation perpetuates poverty in many dimensions. More on that in another blog!

Finally, poor people, and poor children, also experience poverty as voicelessness, and an inability to change the world in ways which are meaningful to them. And this brings me back to the question of why child participation is important. The training we carried out in PNG was about ensuring ChildFund staff are equipped to help poor children and youth raise their voices, and influence the projects that are taking place around them, their projects. Their participation is not only their basic human right, but the key to ensuring these projects are effective and empowering – providing them with a genuine opportunity to break free from poverty.

Building assets for children is important, but eliminating the causes of poverty, and addressing the reasons why child poverty is passed from generation to generation, calls us to work more broadly, on systemic roots.

Three of us travelled to Port Moresby last week to work with our team there, building up our capacity to involve children and youth as active participants in activities that ChildFund supports. This effort is part of our commitment to working on the causes of child poverty – why it exists, how it is perpetuated from generation to generation.

Not only is participation key to overcoming poverty – that’s a good reason for focusing on it, but we also know that participation is essential to program effectiveness and sustainability. Not to mention that it is a basic, fundamental human right – for children and youth, this is spelt out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Not involving people in activities that concern them is, simply, a violation of their human rights.

So we spent two days at the ChildFund office in Port Moresby, learning from each other about how we can enhance child and youth participation through the project cycle, and learning from other ChildFund Alliance members’ experience. Importantly, we also learned from other agencies, organisations that were kind enough to come to our workshop and share their experience – Oxfam, the World Bank, World Vision, and the PNG government itself, all gave informative and inspirational presentations. Of particular interest, to me personally, was the presentation given by Ipul Powesau of the Papua New Guinea Disabled Peoples Association; here we learned about participation and the power of collective action for a particular, excluded group.

And we spent time learning the tools, attitudes and approaches we will need to build the voice and participation of the people we work with in the field – especially children and youth.

Our third day was practical. We took what we learned in the first two days of the workshop out to Laloki – where ChildFund is working with a local literacy school to support vulnerable children from Baruni waste dump and the local community – and we met with over 50 children and youth to learn about their ideas for the rehabilitation of their school, the gardens, the residence, etc.

It was an action-packed morning. After an hour spent in the hot sun connecting with the kids through soccer, rugby and singing, we started the consultation by getting their consent for working with us that day. We broke into five groups – by age and gender – and used the range of techniques that we had learned, getting input from the kids to help us finalise project preparations. The group I was in gave feedback through a focus group and also drew maps of the site – as it is, and as they would like to see it in the future. You can see the kids showing off one of their maps in the photo below.

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