Reimagining Child Participation: A new framework to advance integrated action for meaningful and inclusive child participation

Child participation is both a process and an outcome. Children who are truly empowered to exercise self-expression, agency and voice in the development process not only contribute a critical perspective that helps strengthen community outcomes, but also fulfil their fundamental child rights. Meaningful child participation brings tangible benefits for each segment of society including children themselves, governments, communities, civil society and the economic sector.

Achieving this type of empowerment requires advancing beyond simple participation metrics into more mature, intentional and comprehensive child participation programming. The kind that considers the root causes or barriers and works to create change across every level of the socio-political system. This means working at every level to foster, sustain and institutionalise the values that give space to children’s voices and agency.

This paper describes World Vision’s emerging conceptual framework for reimagining child participation. We outline our way of understanding and designing for meaningful child participation that has evolved through World Vision’s on-the-ground experience and learning alongside communities in East Asia. It reflects what we have found works to help identify and address many of the common barriers or challenges we have found in our efforts to foster child participation. This framework offers a way of conceptualising and analysing the context in which development work is implemented and can be used as a tool to help governments and their development partners unpack and plan for the kinds of collective action that are needed to achieve more sustainable impact.