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Urgent Action to Safeguard Child Rights
A programme of awareness raising, capacity building and networking designed to create an island-wide community of student-run human rights action groups in Sri Lanka.
Description
The target group of the initiative is schoolchildren between 14 and 18 years old, teachers, parents and education officials from a number of schools in five provinces of Sri Lanka. The initiative provided them with awareness programmes on human rights, and then followed up with capacity building programmes for selected students.
They were encouraged to form human rights action groups in their own schools and these groups were networked to form district- and island-wide core groups.
The links formed through this network enabled students to report child rights violations to the authorities and to raise awareness on human rights among their colleagues. In instances where the victimised students were unable to lobby for their own rights or to take action to protect them, the students in the network were able to provide them with support and make their concerns heard.
This increased interaction and cooperation between different groups has promoted awareness on rights violations, thus bringing the issue to light and forcing the authorities to take action to address it.
Aims / Objectives
The initiative seeks to raise awareness among school children and young people of their own rights, and of the need to respect and protect other’s rights and create support groups. SLIMG sees this initiative as especially important in Sri Lanka's militarised, conflict environment, where violations are commonplace and child rights violations are often forgotten in the face of the enormous scale of other rights violations. Through the initiative, participants are empowered to take action against child rights violations. The initiative also provides the participants with the necessary knowledge, practice and attitudes to become key actors in the country's conflict transformation process in future.
How it is Articulated
The initiative consisted of:
- human rights awareness raising programmes for selected students, teachers, parents and education officials;
- assistance establishing student-run human rights action groups in the schools;
- networking services to forge links between these groups at the district level and island level;
- capacity building programmes for the groups.
The action groups subsequently:
- held interactive exhibitions with support from students in the network belonging to all ethnicities and religions;
- conducted research on human rights violations and arranged for counselling for the victims, with the support of SLIMG;
- held annual meetings to form action plans to address human rights needs within their districts and to implement those plans.
Achievements / Learning Points
Through this initiative, SLIMG has been able to reach school children living all over the country, as the extent of the school network and the district core groups shows. The groups have conducted human rights training in schools and have taken action on human rights violations in their areas, informing the local authorities and presenting their case to organisations that work to promote human rights. This is a definite improvement on the former situation in which young people were barely aware of human rights.
Conducting similar programmes can have a huge impact on the children’s lives, building their confidence and enabling them to see themselves as valuable and responsible human beings. Furthermore, it highlights their potential as sources of support and assistance to other children who are trapped in conflict situations as victims of rights violations. It allows school children the motivation to take actual steps for non-violent conflict transformation at a young age, and so to grow up as responsible citizens.
Geographical area of operation
5 provinces in Sri Lanka: Western, North Central, Southern, Wayamba and Sabaragamuwa provinces.
Funding resources
Norwegian Human Rights Fund.
Associated Organisations
Ministry of Education, Parliamentary lobby for Child Rights, Save the Children Alliance, Provincial Interactive Media Group, National Network of Children’s Organisations, CRC-TOT National Student Group, Global Campaign for Education.