The CEOs of Joining Forces’ member agencies are calling for greater support for children’s participation in decision-making
On 19 September during the United Nations General Assembly, the 6 CEOs of the child-focused agencies in the Joining Forces alliance, are presenting a global Call to Action on children’s participation. The Call to Action will be officially launched in late 2023.
Children are agents of change, as recognised by all Member States in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and have the right to participate in decisions affecting them.
In recent years, the mobilisation of children and young people on issues of environmental and climate change crisis, gender equality, racism, violence, police brutality, the fight against oppression, and the impacts of COVID-19 have been unprecedented. However, children – in all their diversity – are still not systematically and meaningfully included in decision-making processes at the global, regional or national levels despite representing more than 30% of the world’s population.
Speaking alongside children at an event in New York, Joining Forces CEOs will be calling for children to have a seat at the table. The message they are sharing at an event called ‘Children as Agents of Change – A Call to Action to Enable Inclusive Child Participation to Accelerate Implementation of the SDGs’ is:
- – Children, as rights holders, must actively, safely and meaningfully participate in all matters and decisions affecting their lives.
- – Stakeholders should recognise children’s rights and evolving capacities and take their views into account, fulfilling their obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, leading to more peaceful and sustainable communities.
“Boys and girls must have spaces in which they can talk about their realities to have the opportunity to learn to express their emotions, their concerns, and their ideas from how they see their context and how it affects them,” says Angie, 13, from El Salvador, who will speak at the event.
Global action on child participation
Together with children, Joining Forces agencies are mobilising around the Call to Action to demand greater financial investments and political will by governments and the wider international community for children’s systematic and sustainable participation in policy and decision-making processes. To call for:
- Institutional engagement with children: To truly understand the impact of issues on children – and the solutions that are needed – policy- and decision-makers must involve children in conversations and decision-making processes that affect them as is their right enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
- Investment in child participation: A lack of financing continues to be a core barrier to children’s meaningful, inclusive participation and as a result, to putting children’s needs and rights at the core of decision making and the achievement of the SDGs.
- Ratification of international child rights instruments: States can demonstrate their commitment to upholding children’s right to be heard by ratifying the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a communications procedure to enable individual children to submit complaints for violations of their human rights to the CRC when all national level options for remedy are exhausted.
Commitments must go beyond words.
By November 2024 and the 35th Anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Joining Forces wants to see tangible action by decision makers to strengthen the child participation eco-system at national, regional and global levels, securing effective, ethical, safe and inclusive participation of children, in all their diversity.
“Remember, even one voice becomes so powerful when the world chooses to be silent. It took me quite a long time to have a voice. Now that I have it, I am not going to be silent, because every child has the right to be heard.”
Jhon, 16-year-old boy, Philippines, quoted in the Joining Forces policy brief, Children’s Right to be Heard: We’re Talking; Are You Listening