On the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, significant steps have been made in protecting child rights and providing a platform for children’s’ voices to be heard, but progress is patchy with some children being left behind, their rights ignored, their wellbeing compromised, and their futures in question.  This continues regardless of other development gains occurring around them.

This event is the culmination of a three-year project highlighting the links between poverty reduction strategies and child protection initiatives with the aim of enhancing global efforts to tackle the alarming scale of child protection deficits in developing country contexts.  The project illuminates the role that poverty plays as a driver of child ill-being, but also illustrates that standard anti-poverty responses can still fail to reach children, without more nuanced action.

In order to inspire effective action to improve children’s wellbeing and capabilities, this programme of work seeks to improve the visibility of child protection deficits and underlying drivers, position child protection concerns within anti-poverty and development programmes and to promote co-ordinated and inter-sectoral action for sustainable impact.

This event will present evidence from research in Uganda, Ethiopia and Vietnam, and from an examination of multiple programme evaluations, which illustrates not only the linkages between poverty and child rights, but also possible solutions to violence against children, including the wider involvement of poverty actors. 

Discussion: How does the development community as a whole address the causes and consequences of violence against children?