21 July 2005 - CRINMAIL 697
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- NIGER: Slow Response to Famine Puts Thousands of Children at Risk [news]
- DAY OF GENERAL DISCUSSION: Children without Parental Care [news]
- EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT: Defining Strategies [event]
- CRIN SERVICES: Key Readings on Children and HIV/AIDS [resource]
- UNITED KINGDOM: Helping Children Help Themselves [website]___________________________________________________________
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Your submissions are welcome if you are working in the area of child rights. To contribute, email us at [email protected]. Adobe Acrobat is required for viewing some of the documents, and if required can be downloaded from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html If you do not receive this email in html format, you will not be able to see some hyperlinks in the text. At the end of each item we have therefore provided a full URL linking to a web page where further information is available.
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- NIGER: Slow Response to Famine Puts Thousands of Children at Risk [news]
[DAKAR, 20 July 2005] - The costs of saving millions of people starving in Niger are rocketing because rich nations ignored calls for early intervention to avert the ravages of last year's drought, relief workers said on Wednesday. Increasingly desperate appeals from aid agencies and the government have encouraged donors to come forward with funds in the past few weeks, but only after large numbers of children began dying of diseases brought on by hunger.
"The funding needs are sky-rocketing because it's a matter of saving lives," said Gian Carlo Cirri, the UN World Food Programme's (WFP) representative in Niger's capital Niamey. "The pity is we designed early enough a preventative strategy, but we didn't have the chance to implement it."
In common with many other crises in Africa, UN officials say the late response in Niger shows how the rich world often misses chances to avoid worse disasters by reacting only when situations reach critical, headline-grabbing proportions. In Niger's case, failed rains and locusts left some 3.6 million people short of food last year, putting tens of thousands of children at risk of starving to death. There is no national mortality data for the West African country, but aid workers say many infants have already died.
Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Tuesday it would have cost $1 a day to prevent malnutrition among children if the world had responded immediately. Now it costs some $80 to save a malnourished child's life, he said.
[Source Reuters. To read the article in full, go to: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L20226863.htm]
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- DAY OF GENERAL DISCUSSION: Children without Parental Care [news]
Date: 16 September 2005
Location: Geneva, Switzerland
In accordance with rule 75 of its provisional rules of procedures, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the body of independent experts responsible for reviewing progress made by States parties in implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has decided to devote periodically one day of general discussion to a specific article of the Convention or to a child rights theme. At its 37th session (in September 2004), the Committee decided to devote its next discussion day on "Children without parental care".
The UN General Assembly 2002 Special Session on Children recognised that there are currently many children who are orphaned or otherwise separated from their parents due to a large variety of reasons. It adopted a Plan of Action, which committed Members States to take special measures "to support such children and the institutions, facilities and services that care for them, and to build and strengthen children's own abilities to protect themselves".
The Day of General Discussion will take place on Friday 16 September 2005, at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Palais Wilson, 52 rue de Paquis), during the 40th session of the Committee at the United Nations Office at Geneva. The purpose of the discussion is to foster a deeper understanding of the contents and implications of the Convention on this topic, improve implementation, and identify practical solutions and steps for ensuring that the rights of children living without parental care are respected.
The discussions are public. Government representatives, United Nations human rights mechanisms, as well as UN bodies and specialised agencies, NGOs and individual experts are invited to take part. However, for organisational purposes, all participants are asked to fill out a registration form, which can be downloaded from the OHCHR website, and needs to be returned before 31 August 2005.
Written contributions submitted by NGOs to the Committee on the Rights of the Child are available on the CRIN website at: http://www.crin.org/docs/resources/treaties/crc.40/Discussion.asp
For more information, contact:
Secretariat, Committee on the Rights of the Child
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNOG-OHCHR
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/discussion.htm
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- EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT: Defining Strategies [event]
Date: 5-12 October 2005
Location: Salzburg, Austria
The Salzburg Seminar is an international, non-partisan, educational organisation dedicated to the recognition and development to tomorrow's leaders. It is organising a seminar session on "Early Childhood Development: Linking New Advances in Research, Theory, and Practice" in October 2005, to exchange information, ideas and practices, to more clearly identify what children need, universally, in order to thrive and develop to their fullest capacities.
Children are enormously resilient - responding and adapting quickly to changing circumstances, learning and growing in even the most difficult situations, drawing upon reserves and strengths we still don't fully understand. However, children are also highly vulnerable, particularly in the earliest years of life. There is an expanding body of research, data and experience that strongly suggests that the most important development period in the life of every human being occurs in the first three years - and that some damage sustained in this period can jeopardise the ability to develop to full capacity later in life.
The session will focus on methods that effectively apply the knowledge and understanding we have regarding children's needs and optimal development and will consider these methods in a cross-cultural context, identifying common principles and practices. It will also look at the continuing gaps in knowledge and focus in particular on issues related to gender and the important role of men in providing care.
Additionally, it will consider important transition phases in the development process of children, including ageing and the attendant changing needs of children, and the important transition from informal to formal care and education systems. Finally, it will focus on how to better align all aspects of children's development, considering their needs from a trans-disciplinary perspective.
In this respect, participants will discuss strategies to inform not just families and institutions how to better support children's optimal growth and development, but also strategies to help prioritise children's needs on the public agenda, educating community leaders, policy-makers and advocates - with the ultimate goal of assuring that public policies serve to enhance children's development, not undermine it.
Application deadline: 5 August 2005
For more information, contact:
Salzburg Seminar, Box 129, A-5010 Salzburg, Austria
Tel: + 43 662 839 830; Fax: + 43 662 839 837
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.salzburgseminar.org
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=5915&flag=event
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- CRIN SERVICES: Key Readings on Children and HIV/AIDS [resource]
The Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) has just published a new reader on "Children and HIV/AIDS" containing key resources designed to support the work of child rights professionals, i.e., CRIN members, students and NGO staff looking for recent thinking and best practice in this area.
This reader contains selected resources relating to children and HIV/AIDS. This includes basic texts that provide an overview on how HIV/AIDS affects children; key legal instruments for HIV/AIDS; best practice documents by thematic areas; and key resources for child rights and HIV/AIDS. Each document featured is accompanied by its summary, publication details and URL.
Readers on issues in child rights are published occasionally by CRIN to include a list of recommended basic texts, further readings and websites. This is the fourth reader produced by CRIN so far, along with the readers on "Child Rights", "National Plans of Actions", and "Children and Armed Conflict".
For more information, contact:
Child Rights Information Network (CRIN)
c/o Save the Children, 1 St. John's Lane, London EC1M 4AR, UK
Tel: + 44 20 7012 6867; Fax: + 44 20 7012 6952
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.crin.org
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=5931&flag=report
To download the previous readers, go to:
http://www.crin.org/resources/viewResourcesP.asp?projID=17
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- UNITED KINGDOM: Helping Children Help Themselves [website]
Save the Children and British Gas have recently launched a new website called "Help Yourselves" designed to give young people in Britain the chance to develop local projects and speak out on issues that affect them. The website aims to inspire and help children and young people to make a positive difference to their community. Through this website and with funding from British Gas, Save the Children will provide 300 here to HELP Awards to groups and individual children in Great Britain over the next three years. The awards will fund innovative, dynamic, youthful and lasting projects conceived by young people that will make a real impact on their communities in the areas of health, education and safety.
For more information, contact:
Anne Carey, Save the Children
5th Floor, Hawthorns House, Halfords Lane
Smethwick, West Midlands B66 1BB, UK
Email: [email protected]
Visit: http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/helpyourselves
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