Opinion: Youth advocacy can accomplish child rights in South Asia

Child exploitation is a widespread crisis in South Asia and a gross violation of child rights. Common forms include commercial sexual exploitation, early and forced marriages, online sexual exploitation, and child labor and exploitation in humanitarian crises and migrant settings.  

While poverty, harmful norms, gender discrimination, and other socioeconomic factors perpetuate the various forms of child exploitation, systemic and structural inadequacies are major contributing factors. Power imbalances, weak implementation and enforcement mechanisms, insufficient budgets and support systems, and policy-level deficiencies are often the root causes of child rights violations.

The urgency lies in reinforcing child protection systems, ensuring that mechanisms are not only in place but are also actively enforced to safeguard every child in their best interest.

This is where lobbying and advocacy become crucial, especially by children and youth themselves who are at the centre and the fulcrum of the issue.

How youth advocacy works

A child or youth advocate speaks up on an issue, calling out for specific action and enlisting recommendations to stakeholders who have the power to enact systemic change.

Children and youth are uniquely positioned to understand and raise awareness about the challenges they face, making their involvement crucial for developing relevant and impactful solutions. They are also in a better position to understand their peers and offer authentic firsthand insight and real experiences to stakeholders in power. This offers sustainability and enhances advocacy efforts.

Implementing youth advocacy calls for collaboration and collective action by placing young people at the center. At Terre des Hommes Netherlands, we organize consultations with children and youth to sensitize them and listen to them on issues that affect them at the local, regional, national and global levels. We enable them to articulate their thoughts, understand their rights, and learn how to advocate for them.

To ensure effective youth advocacy, we believe it is crucial to develop the capacities of youth to effectively advocate for change. This includes building their range of skills, spanning leadership, public speaking, problem-solving, communication, goal-setting, and campaign creation. We focus on mobilizing and supporting children and youth through intersectionality, recognizing the interconnected factors such as gender, disability, and other socioeconomic parameters that shape young people’s experiences. This approach helps us address the compounded challenges faced by vulnerable groups, ensuring that no child is left behind.

By involving young people directly in identifying issues and leading initiatives, they get to take ownership of their well-being. We create platforms such as child protection forums, peer support groups, and children’s clubs where they are trained to engage in advocacy and lead campaigns on critical issues in the region. Through workshops, media campaigns, and digital platforms, children and youth are equipped to challenge societal norms, demand policy changes, and offer their recommendations to reach a wide audience with their messages.

We create safe spaces where young people can express their concerns, ensuring that adult decision-makers listen to and act on their input, integrating child-led advocacy into broader policy decisions. Partnering with other stakeholders, such as governments, international organizations, and civil society groups, can help amplify children’s voices at all levels of decision-making through joint action.

Examples of successful youth advocacy

In South Asia, Terre des Hommes Netherlands directly implements projects in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. We protect children from sexual exploitation in garment factories, address child marriage and exploitation arising from harmful traditions in ethnic minority groups, promote sexual health and reproductive rights, and ensure a safe online environment for children.

A successful example of youth advocacy is the signing of the Thimphu Declaration, which enlists recommendations by children from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation countries to national governments for ending violence in South Asia. Facilitated by Terre des Hommes Netherlands, this declaration was signed in Thimphu, Bhutan, at a youth consultation organized by the South Asian Initiative to End Violence Against Children, the Royal Government of Bhutan and the International Labour Organization. Building on this, National Action Coordination Groups  in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, organized national-level children’s consultations to further amplify its influence on respective governments.

In Bangladesh, child-led advocacy has resulted in system changes that have stopped child marriages, taken children out of child labor, and prevented cyberbullying. For example, under the Breaking the Chains campaign, children directly advocated with families and local leaders to prevent child marriages through a combination of rallies, home visits and discussions with stakeholders. So far, the campaign has successfully protected at least 37 girls.

Children also lobbied school management systems to ensure the enforcement of safety mechanisms in schools. They participated in local governance and ensured the setting up of complaint boxes. At the policy level, Terre des Hommes actively supports the National Action Plan to End Child Marriage and works with key ministries to ensure that policies on child protection, labor, and digital safety reflect the concerns raised by children.

In Nepal, our youth advocacy primarily focuses on encouraging the national government to adopt a comprehensive National Plan of Action to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation. Our youth advocacy for the inclusion of sexual exploitation and child protection prevention in the national education curriculum has seen significant strides with authorities taking the matter forward.

In India, our youth are advocating with the national government to ensure regulation in policies of internet service providers. This will ensure proactive action on filtering and blocking harmful content online.

Taking youth advocacy forward

We believe that youth advocacy efforts are successful when children are placed at the centre, their skills are developed, and they have access to safe and significant platforms where they can speak up. Strategic partnerships with local communities, government entities, the private sector, and child protection organizations in youth advocacy efforts are extremely vital.

The future of youth advocacy lies in greater youth representation in government institutions, more child-led consultations on child rights, and policy dialogue. This can be enabled by setting up youth forums and advisory councils, strengthening youth platforms, and organizing youth-led campaigns. This gives children agency and ensures that mechanisms to protect and support children have their perspectives incorporated.

With combined efforts, we strongly believe that youth advocacy can ensure the upholding of child rights. It is a sustainable approach that organizations can take forward to effectively create mechanisms, institutions, laws, and policies that ensure a safer world for children. What makes this approach essential for catalyzing change is that it actively listens to the voices that matter the most.

For more information about Terre des Hommes Netherlands’ work in Asia, email Mahima Sashank, the regional communications adviser for Asia at m.sashank@tdh.nl.