The Child Rights Governance (CRG) theme is primarily focused on four areas: strengthening civil society to hold the government accountable, including through the use of international UN reporting mechanisms, advocacy and follow up; children’s empowerment to enable them to claim their rights; supporting the government to implement its Child Friendly Local Governance (CFLG) strategy; and advocacy for increased public investment in children.
Save the Children is a pioneer organization to bring together and strengthen civil society to work on child rights issues. It has built the capacity of civil society networks to engage with both the government of Nepal and the UN reporting mechanisms to push for policy reform and improved implementation of those policies.
Save the Children has played a key role to form a broader coalition of civil society networks to prepare and submit supplementary reports on child rights to the Human Rights Council as part of its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process and to the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Save the Children has also facilitated the partnership between civil society and the National Human Rights Commission to follow up with the government of Nepal on the implementation of recommendations/concluding observations from the UN bodies. Save the Children has also been supporting civil society networks to analyze budget for children and to undertake budget advocacy to raise children’s issues high on political agenda.
Save the Children has also been supporting civil society networks to analyze budget for children and to undertake budget advocacy to raise children’s issues high on political agenda. By forming networks of child clubs at the municipality/rural municipality and district level, Save the Children empowers children to engage in dialogues with local authorities to improve allocation of resources to children and enhance the implementation of policies. Save the Children provides the platform to children to exercise their right to participate in local level decision making processes.
Save the Children has been supporting local governments for the implementation of the CFLG framework, whose ultimate goal is to declare respective local units (wards, municipalities/rural municipalities) as child friendly by meeting the pre-set programmatic and institutional indicators focused on children. Save the Children supports as well as provides critical feedback to the government in policy reform process at the national level in order for the government to meet its international obligations created through the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other relevant human rights treaties.
As an attempt to spread the knowledge and understanding of child rights and to influence the development of national child rights frameworks compatible with international standards, Save the Children promotes awareness about and effective utilization of policy documents set by the UN such as the General Comments and Concluding Observations from the Committee on the Rights of the Child; and relevant resolutions of the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly.
Future directions
As Nepal moves from unitary to federal structure where the local governments have been entrusted with an unprecedented level of power, Save the Children has started, and intends to continue, working with them to have children’s issues prioritized in local planning and budgeting processes, to ensure that any local level legislation/policy development is thought through/discussed from children’s rights perspectives based on which child focused/child sensitive provisions get appropriately included in such frameworks.
Save the Children will also emphasize the capacity development of civil society and children vis-à-vis the changed context brought about by the federal structure so as to reap maximum benefit provided by the political transition of Nepal. More specifically, Save the Children will strengthen local civil society networks so that they are able to hold the local governments to account on children’s rights as per the spirit of the Constitution of Nepal 2015, the Local Government Operation Act 2017, the Children’s Act 2018 and other relevant policy frameworks.
