What do ordinary citizens—children and adults alike—think of their community? Are their views taken into account in any critical assessment of it? Are they aware of their rights— including and especially those of children’s? Do children and the larger community have a direct voice in the development of local programs, regulations/laws, and budgets? And do they have any say in the improvement of municipal level government structures?
The Child Friendly Communities and Cities (CFC) Research Initiative aims to address the above concerns. An international project involving Childwatch International, the Innocenti Research Centre (IRC) of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Children’s Environments Research Group (CERG) of the City University of New York, and the Bernard van Leer Foundation, the CFC Research Initiative seeks to enhance the child friendly programs of communities and cities by improving their capacity for gathering and using data on the conditions of children. This is being done through an international critical review of existing systems of assessment and monitoring of child friendliness; and the development and testing of new methods that engage children, adolescents, and parents in participatory processes.
The primary practical products from the project will be a package of tools and an associated set of indicators that can be used and modified by communities and cities to assess and monitor which children’s rights (to survival, development, protection, participation) are being fulfilled, and to what degree. The resulting baseline data can then assist communities and cities in developing a local plan of action and advocacy that comprehensively fulfills children’s rights.
In this phase of the research, the Bernard Van Leer Foundation has awarded Childwatch International funding to pilot the Child Friendly Community assessment and monitoring tools developed by the CERG. Pilot studies to test and refine the methodology for the global study were conducted from May to July 2009 in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo) and the Philippines (Metro Manila). These pilots aimed to test the research tools, provide feedback on which aspects of the methodology work best and which need improvement, and offer recommendations for the revision of the tools for future use.