This Afghan boy, who has spent his entire life as a refugee in Pakistan, is entering Afghanistan for the first time at the Pol-e-charkie refugee camp, 50 kilometres south of Kabul.

“Investments in children are the best guarantee for achieving equitable and sustainable human development.” – UNICEF

The reality of many of the world’s children

Millions of children around the world live in situations that put them at risk of exploitation, abuse, and discrimination. The most marginalized children, those who often experience human rights abuses, need special protection to promote their physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development.

In many developing countries, children represent half of the total population, and up to 60-75 percent in countries where HIV/AIDS or conflict has decimated the adult population. Children also make up a disproportionately large number of the poor. And poverty prevents children from reaching their full potential. It denies them human rights—like those related to education, health and nutrition, participation in decisions that affect their lives, and freedom from abuse, exploitation, and discrimination.

Millions of children around the world don't go to school, often because they have to work. They don't have nutritious food or quality health care. Their lives have been devastated by HIV/AIDS or war. They live and work on the streets. These children often experience exploitation, abuse, and discrimination.

Yet, realizing children's rights is essential to reducing poverty in a sustainable way. And protecting the most vulnerable children—who are often neglected by traditional interventions in health, education, and nutrition—is key to realizing children’s rights.

The numbers

Worldwide, in any given year, over 300,000 children under 18 are exploited in armed conflicts as child soldiers and sex slaves. In the past 10 years, as a result of armed conflicts, about 2 million children have been killed, more than 6 million have been disabled, 1 million have been left orphaned, and about 12 million left homeless.

About 246 million children worldwide are engaged in child labour. About 171 million of them work in hazardous situations or conditions, such as working in mines, with chemicals and pesticides, or with dangerous machinery. There are likely more than 100 million children living and/or working on the streets around the world.

More than 120 million children live with disabilities caused by preventable diseases, congenital causes, malnutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, accidents and injuries, armed conflict, and land mines. Eighty percent of them live in developing countries, and of these, more than 78 percent do not attend school.

Fifteen million children worldwide have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

Well over one million children are forced into the commercial sex trade every year.

Consult Child Protection: The Facts for more information.

The international vision

In 2000, world leaders agreed to the Millennium Development Goals, an ambitious agenda to promote sustainable human development in all countries. Six of the goals relate directly to children: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV, malaria and other diseases. Special measures to protect the rights of the most marginalized children are essential to achieving these goals.

A young street boy takes an art class in Kabul, Afghanistan. This kind of copy work may eventually help him to find a job painting signs.

Canada is active in working to promote children's rights around the world. Canada co-chaired the World Summit for Children in 1990, and played a key role in the negotiations that led to the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a powerful legal instrument that recognizes and protects the rights of children around the world. Adopted in 1989, the Convention, which is now ratified by 192 countries and is the most widely accepted human rights treaty ever, sparked global awareness of the importance of promoting and protecting the rights of children.

Canada hosted the International Conference on War-Affected Children in 2000. And we successfully promoted issues such as child participation and protection for child labourers and children affected by armed conflict at the 2002 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children. Convened to review progress since the World Summit for Children, the Special Session re-energized global commitment to children's rights.

CIDA’s approach to children

Healthy, well-nourished, and educated girls, boys, women and men are the basis of prosperous economies and stable states, and the key to sustainable development. CIDA has worked to strengthen its emphasis on basic human needs by focusing on four social development priorities. Three of the priorities include a child focus: basic education, HIV/AIDS, and health and nutrition, and the fourth, child protection, focuses exclusively on the most marginalized children.

CIDA's approach to child protection

CIDA's Action Plan on Child Protection addresses ways in which CIDA can promote the rights of children in need of special protection from exploitation, abuse, and discrimination. These boys and girls include child labourers, children affected by armed conflict, sexually exploited children, children with disabilities, street-involved children, children facing discrimination because of their ethnic or religious identity, children in conflict with the law or in institutional care, and children affected by HIV/AIDS. They are all children who need special protection to enable their physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development. Within child protection programming, CIDA has identified war-affected children and child labourers as areas of strategic focus.

In its work with the most marginalized children, CIDA uses a rights-based approach. This approach is based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which views girls and boys as full-fledged persons who are active, able, and necessary participants in their own development and that of their communities. It also analyses the structural causes that lead to violations of children's rights, and advocates a holistic response.

CIDA is committed to encouraging children’s participation in the development, implementation, and evaluation of initiatives designed to help them. For example, with CIDA support, war-affected youth have designed, organized, and participated in community-based projects to prevent conflict and build peace in nine countries in Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia.

CIDA's Youth Participation Pilot Projects seek to integrate the participation of young people in all phases of the projects, which focus on a number of different issues—from former child soldiers to child rights to formal education. For example, the Conflict Resolution for Adolescents program is training over 3000 Colombian students and youth to build peace in their communities.

CIDA's Child Protection Research Fund is a $2 million grant fund to support innovative, participatory, and practical research on the situation of children who need special protection. Research supported by the fund will contribute to a deeper understanding of the realities of children’s lives, and of the ways in which CIDA and its partners can best support these children. The groundbreaking findings of the first of 13 studies supported by the Fund, Where are the Girls?, are being used to ensure that demobilization and reintegration programs address the distinct needs of boys and girls in conflict situations.

Since 2000, retired Lieutenant-General Roméo A. Dallaire has criss-crossed the country and the world to speak about protecting children and fostering peace, in his role as Special Advisor on War-Affected Children to CIDA and to the Minister of International Cooperation. As a champion of children affected by conflict, he has engaged and moved the public, and specifically the children of Canada, to get involved in their communities and beyond. During the 2004-05 academic year, General Dallaire is pursuing his research in conflict resolution through a Fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He continues in his role with CIDA, providing advice on issues related to war-affected children in the context of CIDA’s conflict and security, peacebuilding, and social development policy and programming.

CIDA supports child protection through the range of available CIDA programs and through a variety of partners, from multilateral organizations such as UNICEF to non-governmental organizations and research institutions.

Find out more:

• Child protection—CIDA publications and tools.
• CIDA's Action Plan on Child Protection outlines how CIDA promotes the rights of children who need special protection.
• Check out the child protection photo gallery.

• Read CIDA's child protection stories from the field.
• Read A World Fit for Children, the outcome document of the United Nations' Special Session on Children, and A Canada Fit for Children, Canada’s plan of action in response to the Special Session.
• Check out Canada’s website on War-Affected Children.
• Check out the list of related sites and discover numerous links to Canadian and international development resources related to child protection.

• Visit CIDA’s Youth zone website for articles on child protection issues and to find out how youth can get involved.
• Find out what young people are saying about issues of importance to them.
• Find out more about General Dallaire. Read his interview with CIDA’s Youth zone, and his interview for Forced Migration Review. And find out what Emily Carr Middle School students in Ottawa thought after hearing him speak.
• Watch Robbie Williams’ short film, More Precious than Gold, on child trafficking and exploitation.

• Get involved with a non-governmental organization active in promoting children's rights.
• Make the right choices as a citizen and consumer. Find out if the products you buy are made in a way that respects the environment and the human rights of their producers.
• Vote and make a difference in the way Canada responds to child protection issues..
• Talk to your friends, neighbours, colleagues about child protection issues.

Child labourers are girls and boys involved in many different kinds of work for many reasons. Some of the work that children do is not harmful in that it does not stop them from getting an education and it may teach them valuable skills. But some children work in situations that are harmful to their health, or their physical, mental, spiritual, moral, or social development.

CIDA supports working children by trying to ensure that their working conditions are safe and healthy, that they can still have access to basic education or vocational training, and that they can participate in developing programs intended to help them. At the same time, CIDA is working to reduce poverty and change the marginal conditions that force children to work. CIDA is also committed to ending the worst forms of child labour as defined in the International Labour Organization's Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour, including the sexual exploitation of children, bonded or slave labour, and forced participation in armed conflicts.

CIDA supports local organizations working on behalf of children. For example, in Egypt, CIDA support for the Promoting and Protecting the Interests of Children Who Work project has led to the development of several innovative methodologies for improving the lives of children. These include new types of loans and links between small and medium enterprises, support organizations, and social development organizations in areas like literacy and participatory methodologies with children.

India’s Child Worker Opportunities project provided child workers with education, vocational training, and alternative support, and created income-earning opportunities for the children’s families. More than 3,000 children (45 percent of them girls) have been removed from work, and another 1,500 are working significantly fewer hours. The project’s vocational training graduates have experienced an improvement in the quality of their working life, and more than 80 percent of children enrolled in the project’s non-formal education activities have entered and stayed in the formal education system.

Why do children work?

• to help support their families, because they live in poverty;
• to learn life skills that are not taught in schools;
• because they do not have access to a quality education;
• because they are forced to work by their families or communities.

• children are more easily exploited;
• employers can pay children less than they would adults;
• children are well suited to perform specific tasks because of their size.

Children affected by armed conflict are those living through a war or conflict, or dealing with a post-conflict situation. Children are particularly vulnerable to violence, including sexual violence, during war and conflict. They are often left psychologically scarred by the trauma of abduction, detention, sexual assault, or the brutal murder of family members. They are also least able to protect themselves when their families, communities, schools, and social services are damaged or destroyed. And when their schooling is disrupted by war, they are denied the learning opportunities that help to empower them with hope and skills for the future.

The threats children face in war are often directly related to their vulnerability as children. For example, children are more likely to be abducted and forced to serve in armies, their lives may be valued less, and they may suffer greater psychological consequences and be more affected by violence given that they are still forming ideas about the world and themselves.

Boys and girls come out of war dramatically changed—most often for the worse. But, in these tragic situations, there are sometimes small positive elements on which we can build. Children can develop new skills in leadership. They can learn about responsibility, and they can discover their inherent strengths and capacity to survive.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict commits governments to ending the use of child soldiers in combat and the forced recruitment of children under 18.

CIDA projects address a broad range of areas from basic education for children affected by armed conflict to demobilization and reintegration of former child soldiers, as well as conflict resolution and health. For example, CIDA’s Peace and Security Program has supported programming with war-affected children, including counselling and vocational training to help former child soldiers return to their communities.

The Canada Fund for Africa’s $6 million program for war-affected youth aims to address the challenges of war-affected children in Africa's most conflict-affected societies such as Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Uganda, Sudan, Burundi, and Sierra Leone. The program will aim to address the unique educational, economic and psychological needs of war-affected children and youth by supporting sustainable community and school-based interventions developed by and for Africans. In Northern Uganda, CIDA provides food aid, basic health care, clean water and sanitation for 800,000 displaced people, many of them children.

sexually exploited children

Thousands of children are illegally trafficked across international borders—primarily for sexual exploitation, including prostitution and pornography. Children are also sexually abused in their own homes and communities by relatives and friends. The millions of children, mostly girls, who work as domestic servants around the world are particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation and violence. Girls are more often sexually exploited than boys and have to deal with unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions. All sexually exploited children are at high risk of violence and injury, sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS, social ostracism, and losing their sense of worth and hope for the future.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography commits governments to taking all necessary measures to prohibit the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.

CIDA programming with sexually exploited children includes psychosocial counselling and medical support to children in Zimbabwe who have been sexually exploited, monitoring of the trafficking of women, girls and boys in South-East Asia for the purpose of sexual exploitation; and helping children in Nicaragua to exit the sex trade and begin the healing process.

children with disabilities

One child in 10 is born with or acquires a physical, mental, sensory, intellectual, or physiological disability because of preventable diseases, congenital causes, malnutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, accidents and injuries, armed conflict, or land mines. It is estimated that only five percent of disabled children in developing countries have access to support services of any kind, and less than five percent go to school. Children with disabilities face intense discrimination and stigma and they do not have the same opportunities as non-disabled children.

street-involved children

The United Nations defines street-involved children as “boys and girls for whom the street (including unoccupied dwellings, wasteland, etc.) has become their home and/or source of livelihood, and who are inadequately protected or supervised by responsible adults.”

It is estimated that well over 100 million children are living or working on the streets worldwide—half of them girls. Most street-involved children are between 8 and 18 years old, although in many regions, children as young as five are living without adult supervision on the streets. Some street-involved children live and work on the streets with their parents; others work alone during the day, but return home at night; some maintain contact with their family, but are forced to spend most of their time on the streets; and there are still others who sleep and live entirely on the streets without any family contact.

Street-involved children can develop a strong sense of community with one another, but are often mistrustful of authority. They are often subjected to human rights abuses, including forced institutionalization and violence. They face great health risks because of lack of hygiene, poor nutrition, and air pollution. Most do not attend school because they have to work during school hours. If they do attend, they tend to perform poorly and are at risk of dropping out because they find it hard to conform to the strict rules and setting of formal classrooms.

children facing discrimination because of their ethnic or religious identity

Children from certain religious or ethnic groups and indigenous children are often the target of discrimination and violence. These children face a greater threat of being institutionalized or treated unfairly by authorities, and they may also be specifically targeted during times of armed conflict.

children in conflict with the law or in institutional care

In countries where there are no legislative guidelines on when and how children are taken into custody, children are often incarcerated for minor offences that are symptomatic of their poverty, such as loitering or soliciting. These children can be exposed to a variety of unfair and abusive situations: they may be tried as adults, subjected to cruel treatment and punishment, held without access to education or family visits, or experience physical or sexual violence from older inmates.

Orphans, or children abandoned by or removed from their families, often live in institutions. Ideally, children in institutional care find the safe, protective, and nurturing environment they need. In some cases, however, they can face problems of neglect, abuse, violence, and isolation from their communities.

children affected by HIV/AIDS

Boys and girls are increasingly orphaned and become heads of households as a result of AIDS. Others are made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS because they have an ill parent, live in a poor household that has taken in orphans, are discriminated against because a family member has HIV, or have HIV themselves. As a result, many drop out of school to care for their parents or siblings or to provide income for their families.