Circles of Care: Community Child Protection

Summary: A Participatory Research Model Strengthening Restorative
Local Governance in Support of South African Children’s Rights. This report was submitted to the Child Protection and Gender Equality Programme of the Canadian International Development Agency.

Summary

The Circles of Care: Community Child Protection project, lead by the Child and Youth Care Agency for Development (CYCAD) and the International Institute for child Rights and Development (IICRD), applied a participatory research model that builds on the resiliency of children and self - mobilization potential of their communities to strengthen the child rights capacity of local governance. The project was conducted in partnership with local, provincial, and traditional tribal governance partners in the Free State, with the aim of developing and piloting a community model of child rights responsive governance that could be applied in other South African provinces, contexts and situations.

The participatory research model resulted in a three - stage model of children’s rights that is supported both by a “bottom up” approaches to child protection that is reflective of children’s local social ecology, and “top down” advocacy drawing on South Africa’s national and provincial legal and policy commitments to child rights.

Further information:

This report was part of the Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA) child protection research fund.

• Find out more about the project
• Read the summary here