[MUSIC] Okay, so today in this session I'm going to be talking about monitoring and evaluating children participation. So we've heard a bit about what participation is, and now we want to look at how we know what it is that we're doing and what we're achieving. So there's a lot of reason why it's important to measure participation. We need to find out what works, and why it works. We need to be much clearer about what it is that we're trying to do, because that enables children and young people to hold adults to account in the work that they're doing. It also helps us identify what kind of support and what sort of resources are needed in order to ensure effective and meaningful children's participation. And ultimately it also helps us to build an evidence base which shows that participation can and does achieve better outcomes for children. And that's important in terms of convincing politicians that they should invest in these measures and processes. And convince donors that they should support programs to achieve this end. This doesn't mean that the right to participation is contingent upon an evidence base that it works. The right to participation is a fundamental human right, not contingent on outcomes. But in the real world, we have to be practical and we have to recognize that if we want governments to commit to changing laws and changing resources and committing to creating the spaces for participation, it helps a great deal if we can show that this is a positive process which produces better protection for children, better outcomes for children. So what I wanted to talk about today is a tool that's been developed over a number of years, which has been published and is available now. It's been published jointly by UNICEF, Save the Children, Plan International, World Vision and an Indian-based NGO that concern for working children. And it's a tool which has been piloted in ten countries over two years to explore and develop how effective it is. So, the tool consists of three dimensions, the scope of participation, the quality, and the outcomes. So firstly looking at scope, so what we want to examine is at what point in any process do children actually get a chance to influence or be involved? So if you think about the cycle of a program, you do your initial finding out, your situation analysis, what are the problems, what are the issues? And then based on that, you plan and prioritize what it is you're going to focus on. And then you develop a program and you implement your program. And then you monitor and evaluate what actually happen as a result of the program and then you disseminate the findings and act on the findings. So, you've got a cyclical process. So, one of the things is to look at, well, at what point in that cycle do children actually get involved, or how do they get involved in deciding what should be focused on, do they get involved in design, do they get involved in any of those stages? And then alongside that, we want to look at, in an early program, we looked at different levels of participation, consultative, collaborative, and child-led. So in each of those stages, finding out what the problem is, designing the program. Are children involved, and are they involved in a consultative fashion, in a collaborative fashion, or are they leading the process? So you can, on a matrix, then plot visually the nature of children's participation where it is they're coming into a program and at what level. And you can use that to begin to explore with the children, well, is this what we want, do we want to do more than this, would we like to have come in earlier, would we have liked to collaborate rather than just be consulted and you made the decisions? How do we want to change or improve or strengthen the way in which we participating? And then the next part of the tool, looks the quality of the participation. And there are nine basic requirement which have been identified by committee on the the rights of the child to look at what constitutes ethical and meaning participation. And those include things like that it's voluntary, that the participation is relevant, that it's inclusive, that it's child-friendly, that it's safe and so on. And there are a set of tools to help children measure and evaluate the extent to which they think it meets each of those requirements. And then the third stage is the outcomes of the participation. And there are two types of outcomes. There are outcomes for children themselves, do they personally feel as a result of their engagement, they have learned things, that they become more confident, that they got high self-esteem, that they're more valued within their local communities? And has it achieved change in terms of the outcomes of the project we're seeking to achieve? So if you got a project, for example, which was looking at one of the projects in the pilot, for instance, in Nicaragua was looking at trying to end the use of corporal punishment in schools. So they were working with children to campaign and raise awareness of the scale of violence, the prevalence, and the harm it was doing to children and their learning. And so, you would set at the beginning of your program with children, a set of goals, objectives about what the project was for. And you then look at how are you going to measure what it changed. And then at the end of the project, you'd look at, well, what did we achieve, did we get there? And then you'd look at that in relation to the nature of children's participation and the quality of it. And look at how children's participation had achieved real change, both for the children themselves and for the realization of their rights. So through those three measures you can begin to work with children to strengthen participation and begin to build an evidence base of what can be achieved through children's active engagement in their own lives. We're hoping that all of this work is going to be encouraged and disseminated globally. And we're going to collect the findings of that evidence on a digital platform, hosted by an organization called Charter Child. So we're going to build up a global evidence base of what children's participation is achieving, in order to make the case to demonstrate that there is enormous positive benefit associated with the commitment to realizing children's right to participation. [MUSIC]