Adults First! An Organisational Training for Adults on Children's Participation

Originally written for a training workshop of the Children's Rights Foundation of Cambodia in 2004, this manual describes an organisational training on children's participation run by Save the Children Sweden. The authors, Caspar Trimmer and Henk van Beers summarise the need to train adults in children's participation rights: "For children's fundamental participation rights to be realised, it is adults, not children, who most urgently need to learn. Children's participation rights demand that adults listen to children, understand them and take action based on what children say. Adults often need to encourage children to participate and provide opportunities for them to do it. Thus, children’s rights to participate is, for now at least, heavily dependent upon adults."

In short, this manual explains the training activities used in the workshop, and outlines several more. The workshop participants took part in activities that could be used in sessions with adults or children. After each activity, the facilitator provided additional information regarding objectives, methods, alternative approaches, and issues to be kept in mind. The contents include:

Introduction

• Activity 1: Understanding childhood
• Activity 2: Expectation check, objectives and rule setting

Understanding children’s participation

• Activity 3: Unfair treatment
• Activity 4: Why involve children?
• Activity 5: What is a child?
• Activity 6: Proverbs about children

Defining children’s participation

• Activity 7: What is children’s participation?
• Activity 8: A working definition of children’s participation
• Activity 9: The right to participate
• Activity 10: History of children’s rights and children’s participation
• Activity 11: Discovery

Ways of involving children

• Activity 12: Sharing experiences
• Activity 13: Practice standards in children’s participation
• Activity 14: What went wrong?
• Activity 15: Designing workshops for capacity building on children’s participation

Annexes

• Annex I: Some useful web sites
• Annex II: Scenarios for some possible additional activities
• Annex III: Handout on facilitation skills

The workshop aimed at deepening participants’ understanding of children’s participation both through experiential activities and by looking at the standards and historical and human rights perspectives on children’s participation.