Kavita Ratna on making child participation sustainable
For the past 30 years, Kavita Ratna has worked on raising the voices of the most vulnerable children, starting with children and adolescents who have been compelled to work for a living. We spoke with her about finding success in the most challenging of contexts.
As a Director of Advocacy at The Concerned for Working Children, Kavita Ratna has dedicated her career to advocate for children’s rights and agency. The Concerned for Working Children (CWC) is a non-profit, secular, and democratic development agency pioneering child rights, particularly children’s right to self-determination, in India. CWC works in partnership with children and their communities, local governments, and national and international agencies to implement viable, comprehensive, and appropriate solutions to address the various problems that children and their communities face. CWC is deeply committed to empowering children and ensuring their democratic participation in all matters that affect them.
Since the beginning, CWC has been deeply involved in promoting the rights of working children. In 1990, the organisation supported working children and adolecents to set up Bhima Sangha, their own union for working children. Soon after the organisation realised that all children, working or not, were eager to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to be taken into account. In the early years, school-going children would pretend to be working to gain access to the welcoming space that Bhima Sangha offered for children to set their own priorities - a testimony to the few opportunities children had to be heard. Subsequently, CWC expanded its work in facilitating children’s mobilisation and participation in all arenas of their lives, including in governance, to other vulnerable communities – a mission the organisation has followed ever since.
Building participatory structures that withstand change
Throughout her career, Ratna has worked with and studied child participation structures around the world. She has advised the Committee on the Rights of the Child on three General Comments (on participation, on child rights during adolescence and on children in street situations), worked with numerous international organisations, and consulted children on their experiences around the world.
Having worked in such a wide range of socio-economic realities around the world, Ratna concludes that regardless of context, challenges in establishing participatory structures are often the same everywhere. Building local capacities to establish, support and maintain child participation structures is key, but children age out of participatory structures just as adults supporting them change jobs. At the same time, governments change and donors shift their priorities elsewhere. According to Ratna, the key to success is setting in motion dynamic, value based processes; and creating systems and structures that sustain and evolve amidst the changes that are inherent to any governance system and community.
Starting points are different, but success is possible everywhere
Ratna says that the current political climate is ‘challenging’ for promoting meaningful engagement of all persons, especially children. Children and young people are growing increasingly frustrated about not being heard or being taken with the seriousness their deserve. They also feel the lack of appropriate information and skill sets for their meaningful and equitable participation
Despite these concerns, Ratna emphasises that when there is a will there is a way – everywhere. Through her work, she has witnessed how participatory structures can work in the most challenging of environments. This is particularly so when they are part of the mainstream, built into institutions, recognised by law, strongly anchored in the local civil society, and most importantly driven by young people’s democratic participation. Ratna highlights Nepal as an example of a recent democracy that has established strong institutional structures for child participation, including the recognition of child rights in the Constitution and the establishment of local ‘child clubs’ that are strongly anchored in local civil society. The child clubs, akin to local children’s councils, have been active since the 1980s and withstood the impact of two coups between then and today – a true testimony to their sustainability, as of now.
Success is possible everywhere, but Ratna acknowledges that the starting points are different. That is why she prefers to set the standards for working with children at levels that are realistic – sparking a sense of “this I can do” with people she engages with, as she puts it.
Levelling the playing field for diversity
When it comes to working with children, and particularly children experiencing vulnerability or marginalisation, Ratna calls for sensitivity to the diversity the children represent. She stresses the importance of creating space for diversity of opinion. At times, the polarisation of politics trickles down to children, bringing them at loggerheads with each other. Yet, spaces meant to be inclusive become exclusive without an adequate understanding of the different starting points children come from. For example, children without previous experience of participatory spaces may find traditional youth councils alienating.
“The present playing field is not equal – so ensuring equity and affirmative action is one of our most important roles as adult facilitators”, Ratna says.
Working with vulnerable groups also calls for a particular sensitivity to the risks that come with raising one’s voice. Sometimes children’s expressions of criticism bring them in conflict with decision makers, particularly when raising issues that are considered controversial. In those moments, it is crucial for adults to protect the children and help them manage potential backlash, Ratna says.
The backlash children face when advocating for their rights changes over time. For example, working children today face different risks than they did in the 1980s, when the Concerned for Working Children started. During her career, Ratna has seen working children invited to speak at the UN in the 1980s, but then having to go in hiding for fear of being apprehended by the labour officials in the late 1990s. Yet, sometimes it is those children with the most at stake who are the first ones to call for their voices to be heard, regardless of the risks involved.
“In many countries, the working children were the first ones to get organised and claimed their space to participate against the odds”, Ratna says. Doing so, they opened the doors for many other children to be heard, too.
Bio
Kavita Ratna is Director of Advocacy at the Concerned for Working Children, a non-governmental organisation working in the areas of children rights and the rights of their communties. CWC has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize thrice. Kavita has worked at the organisation for over 30 years and enaged with the International Movement of Working Children since its formation in 1996. She facilitates children’s participation, especially that of working and highly vulnerable young people, at local, national, regional and international levels in India and internationally. Beyond the working children’s movement, Ms Ratna is an internationally recognised resource person on child participation, citizenship, youth participation and developmental comunications and has contributed to the development of the General Comment number 12 on children’s right to be heard, and General Comment number 20 on the implementation of the rights of the child during adolescence. She has also worked with several international and national organisations including the Save the Children, SIDA, UNICEF, ECPAT – International, and ILO.
