Often it is not easy for children to raise their voice to express their opinions, wishes and concerns to adults. In many contexts, they do not have the space to share whether they feel unsafe, worried, angry, what makes them feel happy or what they would like us to improve in our activities. Through this project, we aim at providing frontline staff with child-friendly methodologies and material that is interactive, visual, playful, to help them set up feedback spaces that are adapted to children.
Our impact
4 countries involved
Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq
125 children and 17 staff
involved in the co-creation process of the tool
24
The Article 12 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to freely express their views and to influence decision that affect them. It recognises that children can enrich decision making processes and participate as agents of change. This applies also in humanitarian action. Children have the right to share their perspective about their needs and wishes. As humanitarian workers we have the responsibility to act upon what they tell us to improve the relevance and quality of our interventions and to make sure that they are safe while participating in Tdh projects. Most importantly, we acknowledge that genuine participation contributes to self-determination and well-being. Their perspectives on their own needs and desires are not just valuable but essential.
However, in practice, children’s voice is still too rarely taken into account in humanitarian action due to different reasons: culturally, it is not well seen for children to provide critical feedback to adults, they also do not have the means to communicate with humanitarian workers, they do not feel that they are entitled to speak out, or our communication channels are often not adapted to them or they just do not know that they can reach us to share their wishes and concerns.
Based on conversations with 125 children in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, we developed a guide to discuss with children on feedback and humanitarian accountability. "We call it a lesson because it teaches us very important information. Like confidence, we didn’t know how to build our self-confidence, but now we do.” shared a participant of a focus group discussion on providing feedback. The guide covers the following topics: children's feelings when participating in humanitarian project, what are the issues children could face eventually, how can they share their concern with humanitarian, and what answers / resolution they could expect to address them in the best possible way. It includes:
1) A set of illustrated cards to trigger conversations with children on issues in humanitarian action, ways to address feedback and complaints, and resolutions they can expect.
2) A guide for animators on how to moderate a discussion with children using the cards.
3) Samples of posters to share information on accountability and feedback mechanisms.
