Leaving No Child Behind: Toward Greater Synergy between Social Protection and Child Protection Systems
With the goal of addressing child protection systems in connection with the theme of the 57th Session of the Commission for Social Development, “Addressing inequalities and challenges to social inclusion through fiscal, wage and social protection policies”, a side event was co-organized by the International Movement ATD Fourth World, the Global Coalition to End Child Poverty, the Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors, SOS Children’s Villages, and UNICEF. It was entitled “Leaving No Child Behind: Toward Greater Synergy between Social Protection and Child Protection Systems.”
The event brought together representatives from the Permanent Missions of Bangladesh and Rwanda to the United Nations, experts from SOS Children’s Villages and UNICEF, and an ATD Fourth World activist with direct experience of poverty to explore the steps already taken and the work that needs to be done to achieve more integrated social and child protection systems.
The event opened with moderator Mr. Josh Chaffin, an expert consultant promoting change for women, children, adolescents, and youth, who reminded the audience that almost one child out of five lives in extreme poverty in the world today and only 35 percent of children worldwide benefit from effective access to social protection programs. Highlighting how the experiences of families in extreme poverty reveal a disconnect between social protection on one side and child protection on the other because they fail to tackle the multiple deprivations families face, Mr. Chaffin stated the objective of this side event: to explore how to strengthen the links between child protection and social protection in a way that is more supportive of family-based and community-based responses.
Speaking from experience, Ms. Maxine Andujar, an activist involved with ATD Fourth World, talked about the effect poverty has had on her own family and on families like hers. Ms. Andujar confirmed that many children are forcibly removed from their parents for reason of "neglect." But she views the actual reason as poverty, because the parents’ low income leads to living standards that social workers consider neglect.
In fact, some parents are simply not getting enough money to properly support their families. Ms. Andujar's inability to work because of her health situation requires her to live off cash assistance from the City of New York amounting to $155.05 every two weeks. Along with food stamps, this is all she has to provide for her children and pay bills. She insisted that no children should be removed from their family because of poverty.
At the same time as parents are struggling to make ends meet, foster parents receive between $700 and $2,000 a month to support a placed child. The discrepancy in the amounts paid to foster parents compared with those paid to parents receiving welfare benefits shows a critical flaw in the social protection systems in place in New York.
Poverty often forces families to make hard choices that may limit the future of one of its members. Because her son was bullied in school and his teachers and principal were of no help, Ms. Andujar decided to homeschool him, which she saw as the only way to protect her child and ensure his right to a proper education.
She made the hard decision to delay her efforts to further her own education so she could ensure that her son has what he needs. Her son has now advanced in his curriculum and is doing better than he did in school. Despite this success, she reminded the participants that a safe and productive school environment should not be viewed as a privilege but as an entitlement for all children.
Next, His Excellency Tareq Md. Ariful Islam, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of Bangladesh to the United Nations, spoke on addressing the multiple deprivations of children through several policies and practices that Bangladesh has integrated into its child-sensitive social protection plan.
In recent years, the Bangladeshi government has implemented a cash transfer system that not only eliminates middlemen by putting money directly into the accounts of parents who have a low income, but also emphasizes the need to reach all families in all areas, considering that many cash transfer programs are often not available to those who need them most. According to His Excellency, the introduction of this program was followed by a decrease in school dropout rates.
On the topic of education, Mr. Islam further shared his view that a focus on education can often have a multiplier effect on other sectors of deprivation, much like health care. To illustrate this, he discussed Bangladesh’s newer educational programs that have prioritized gender equality and accessible education for all of the nation's children. Free meals are now provided in schools to all the students, giving children of lower income backgrounds more of an incentive to attend school every day.
In its efforts to ensure education for all children, the government of Bangladesh has started to send buses that offer mobile schooling to some of the country’s remote areas. These buses are equipped with technology and textbooks so that the children of these areas can be just as well educated as those in more accessible areas of the country.
The prevalence of child marriage in countries that already lack resources makes it an issue that is not easily targeted and not always prioritized. In contrast, Bangladesh passed the Child Marriage Restriction Act of 2017. Over the past year, the Act was updated and more goals were added to it, the most prominent being to end child marriage by 2030. The plan is to increase social and public awareness of the harms of child marriage, for example through social clubs where young people can discuss such issues.
Mr. Robert Kayinamura, Counsellor from the Permanent Mission of Rwanda to the United Nations, shared the views of the Rwandan government that child-sensitive social protection is vital to its overall goals of transforming society. It does so by prioritizing a holistic approach to social protection, because in order to take care of the child, the families and the caretakers of that child should be considered, as well as the society that the child is a part of.
Many of the programs Rwanda has in place are concerned with keeping children with their families. These programs boost families’ ability to sustain themselves through building their own home or receiving a cow that produces enough milk for them to drink as well as to sell. Because they are designed to build up families, these programs are less likely to tear them apart and have contributed to the eradication of every one of Rwanda’s orphanage centers. However, this does not stop program staff from calling and checking up on all known adopted children to ensure they’re receiving the proper care, nutrition, and education.
Additionally, Mr. Kayinamura explained how a negative bias towards doctors in Rwandan society led to the unnecessary deaths of many children. Because a majority of people associate the doctor with large sums of money they could not afford, this bias led to some premature deaths among children.
In order to prevent more such deaths, the government has put in place a plan that not only provides free health care for all but also requires everyone to use it, especially parents. In order to ensure the safety of children should they fall ill, local workers go door to door and ask families how many children they have and if those children are insured.
From the perspective of SOS Children’s Villages, an NGO dedicated to providing services to children in need and protecting their rights around the world, the importance of diversifying the approaches to child protection and family strengthening is vital. SOS Children’s Villages’ programme advisor Mr. Andro Dadiani, speaking from his experience on the service side of child protection services, highlighted how the separation of families was an unacceptable way to resolve the issue of poverty and recommended diversification of approaches to such issues.
Services to children who were raised in care and have no other resources could be extended to help them integrate into society, which would in itself bridge a gap between child-sensitive social protection and social protection alone. Support that often started in care and that teaches children how to build their careers or do certain tasks is not offered once the child turns 18, making the transition into independent life more challenging than it already can be.
The solution to such problems, said Mr. Dadiani, lies in the theme of this side event: a greater synergy between economic assistance and diverse family strengthening programs that would break the pattern of children in care being abandoned once they are legally of age. If social protection systems work hand-in-hand, this synergy is created and can assist in the development of more child-sensitive protection.
Coming just days after having attended the International Conference on Universal Child Grants in Geneva, Mr. David Stewart, UNICEF expert on child poverty and social protection, relayed some aspects of the conference.
He began by addressing the much discussed question of whether it is time for every child in the world to receive some sort of cash support from the government. Organizations differed in their responses, but one common ground was the importance of childhood and child poverty that was acknowledged by every organization, including the World Bank and the IMF.
Another strong consensus was that we have to be careful if the focus of social protection is on poverty alone. For example, the UK’s Universal Credit Program has created a degrading stigma for people in the position of needing to receive benefits. In contrast, after a civil war in 1918, Finland viewed universal child grants as a national commitment to the children of their country, prioritizing children as members of society regardless of their economic status. As a general consensus emerged around child benefits, the question of affordability was raised, as well as the need for more coherent recommendations and policies from international organizations and donors.
On the synergy between social protection and child-sensitive social protection, Mr. Stewart said, the emphasis was on the need to link these systems with one another as well as to prioritize particular types of vulnerabilities instead of targeting all policies to all vulnerabilities. This issue arises because social services tend to respond to financial vulnerabilities more than social ones. Furthermore, there can be no strong synergies between systems when the systems themselves are not strong. Without the strengthening of these systems, there will never be meaningful synergies; and the systems cannot be strengthened without the support of government leadership.
To conclude, synergy can be defined as “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.” Greater synergy between social protection and child protection systems would lead to a greater effect than these systems could produce alone. The combination of these systems would provide protection and security not only for current members of society, but also for the children who will soon grow into that society.
The achievement of this synergy can take form in different programs, many of which have already worked in several countries; for example, cash transfer programs, mobile-education-based programs, reducing the stigma of healthcare, or rethinking how and why we fund child-sensitive social protection. But one thing is certain: the system is not currently prioritizing child-sensitive social protection. Making child-sensitive social protection a priority would mean that we as a society are not only making children a priority but also viewing them as fellow members of the world they will one day lead.
Report of the CSocD57 side event on February 14th 2019, at the United Nations HQ in New York.