Our programs

The Child and Youth Friendly Governance Project is committed to implementing programmes in the following areas:

  • There is currently limited collaboration between organisations and institutions working on child participation and child-friendly governance at the regional and international levels. Consequently, many opportunities are missed to join forces (and resources), share knowledge and learning, identify potential for collaboration around shared objectives, and strengthen commitment to child-friendly governance overall. At the same time, a constant challenge in effective action for children is the lack of coordination systems and not having access to the right know-how and tools at the right time. Consequently, practitioners report feeling left on their own and reinventing what they know others have already developed, as they do not know where and how to access this knowledge and practice. At the same time, there is an increasing demand in learning from other countries across the world, but no single actor responding to that demand. The Child and Youth Friendly Governance Project seeks to respond to this gap by strengthening commitment, brokering collaboration, and fostering knowledge exchange.

  • Understanding child rights and being able to apply them in daily practice are cornerstones of child-friendly governance at all levels. This includes not only raising the awareness of child rights among adult practitioners and decision makers, but also raising children’s awareness of their own rights. One of the goals of the Child and Youth Friendly Governance Project is to strengthen the understanding of child rights and equip adults and children with the skills and capacities to support the effective realisation of these rights.

  • Despite the important body of theory and guidance developed over the past decades, adults and children working with child-friendly governance call for more tailored support to translate their commitment into action. One of the goals of the Child and Youth Friendly Governance Project is to support local action by filling this gap by providing tools, tailored technical support, and digital solutions that facilitate local child participation. Our focus is on practical, directly actionable solutions that turn existing theory into practice, and making those solutions easily available in multiple languages in one place.

  • Measuring the impact of child and youth participation is key to making sure that participation leads to improved outcomes for children and that existing processes are effective and of good quality. Strengthening the evidence for the impact of participation is also key to securing resources and buy-in from governments at all levels and making the case for why investing in participatory structures is important at all levels. Effective monitoring and evaluation will ultimately ensure that participatory processes are transparent and accountable, particularly to children and young people.

Our thematic priorities

As the world we live in is constantly shifting, so are the thematic priorities we focus on. The Child and Youth Friendly Governance Project does not operate with five-year strategic plans but is constantly adapting to the changing environment and the changing needs of children and young people.

Children have the right to be heard on all decisions impacting their lives, regardless of the topic. Therefore, in all our work with and for children, our thematic priorities are defined by children and young people themselves. Recent consultations with children have highlighted equality and non-discrimination, safety and violence prevention, education, family, mental health and well-being, and climate change among their priorities.