Chapter 5
City Streets and Children's Rights
During the early part of the development era, organizations concerned with
poverty in the developing world as it affected people rather than as it
affected nations concentrated their efforts in the countryside. Convention held
that poverty in its most grinding form was to be found in the lined face and
prematurely ageing bodies of the peasant farmer and his wife, working in the
fields from sun-up to sundown in everlasting backwardness and ignorance.
Rural life was regarded as invariably harder than town life since all work
demanded unremitting toil, prospects were severely limited, services were fewer
and disease rates and illiteracy noticeably higher. Some of these assumptions
have been increasingly challenged in recent times by those championing the
urban poor1. But two decades ago it was received wisdom that children born
into poverty-stricken rural families were automatically much worse off in terms
of exposure to disease and malnutrition, as well as educationally, than their
counterparts in town.
This view was substantiated by the historical reality that cities had always
been both the products and the engines of wealth. The laws of productive
enterprise demanded that resources for development investment were skewed
in favour of metropolitan centres, the sites of industry, government and intellectual
life. That cities had poor neighbourhoods was an inevitable part of the
process of wealth creation, which beckoned the go-getting and the disenfranchised
from the countryside, offering paid jobs, casual work or petty entrepreneurship
in the 'informal sector'. Slums had been a feature of everyone's
industrial revolution and while they presented public health and security hazards,
the expansion of the city would in time act as an absorbative, devouring
120 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
its problems in a continuing process of more wealth creation. That at least had
been the experience of the Western world.
In the early 1970s, it became apparent that cities in the developing world
were growing far too fast for the usual assumptions about patterns of urbanization
to apply. It took London over a century—1800-1910—to multiply its
population by seven to 7.3 million, a growth rate now being achieved by many
third world cities within a generation2. It was in Africa especially, and in Asia,
that growth rates were highest: the process had begun earlier in Latin America,
where the urban presence of two thirds of the population was causing increasing
social and economic strain3. Urbanization was taking place at a speed out
of any synchronization with the rate of expansion in employment, housing or
services. The result was a proliferation of barrios, favelas, bustis, bidonvilles—
squatters' settlements of flimsy shacks in disused nooks of the city centre or
wastelands on its edge. These blots on the municipal escutcheon were growing
at a pace far faster than that of the cities themselves, in which half the
population might typically live in slums4.
The widespread alarm felt by demographers and planners about the phenomenon
of 'exploding cities' led to the first international conference on
human settlements, HABITAT, held in Vancouver in 1976. Some of the leading
cities in the developing world were growing at rates of between 7 and 10
per cent a year5. Although 60 per cent of the city 'explosion was attributable to
high birth rates among existing urban residents6, the phenomenon was mainly
associated with the exodus from countryside to town. This was universally
frowned upon, as if urban newcomers consisted mainly of ne'er-do-wells drawn
by bright city lights. The reality was that the average pioneer opting for urban
migration was typically driven by poor agricultural prices, landlessness, lack of
employment, debt, drought or flood disaster—forces far outside his or her
control.
The typical municipal reaction was to regard squatters and shanty-town
inhabitants as transients who had strayed temporarily from home. The migrants
constructed 'temporary' shelters out of waste materials and occupied—
illegally—vacant land that was usually low-lying, precipitous or hazardous in
some way. Treated as marginal to the city's economic life, slum-dwellers endured
an imposed culture of impermanence. Tenure, security and amenities
were withheld on the basis that service availability would attract more rural
indigents into town. The only welfare available—food hand-outs, medicines,
second-hand clotkes—came from religious orders and charitable institutions.
Extreme measures—bulldozers and mass evictions—were often used against
the urban poor, and still occasionally are.
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 121
These policies proved futile. As fast as slum-dwellers were trucked away to
new settlements on the outskirts of cities such as Nairobi, Metro Manila and
Delhi, their places along the railway tracks, beside the river bed and around the
municipal garbage dump were reoccupied. For all the indications that they
were not wanted, those exchanging agricultural life for the mud and garbage of
the slum were not prepared to go away. Work, cash and amenities beckoned the
new city-dwellers. The squalor, the high cost of city life, the loss of traditional
community ties and the resultant changes in family life were a price that they
were willing to pay for a foothold on the ladder to the modern world.
By the late 1970s, the proportion of slum and shanty-town residents in
many cities was between 30 and 60 per cent, and in some was spectacular: in
Addis Ababa, 79 per cent; in Calcutta, 67 per cent; in Bogota, 60 per cent7.
Poverty was well on its way to becoming as much an urban as a rural phenomenon.
Between two thirds and three quarters of this rapidly expanding group—
the 'urban poor'—were women and children8. The poorest households were
those headed by women, which in some cities constituted a third of the total9.
Encumbered with child-rearing responsibilities and without skills or access to
salaried employment, such families were totally dependent on cash for items
that, in the countryside, were supplied from the fruits of stream, field and
furrow. Childhood malnutrition, infection and general ill-health were the rule
rather than the exception.
Striking as the evidence of urban misery was becoming, many observers
remained locked into the perspective that poverty as a development rather than
a welfare issue was a rural phenomenon, and that where it intruded into town
the best policy was to leave well alone. Unicef, however, .took the line as early
as 1961 that if need was its principal criterion of assistance, there was no
justification for excluding urban children from its assistance10. Although it was
more than another decade before urban activity began in earnest, Unicef never
allowed itself to be deflected from the problems of childhood in the slum by
the false assumption that all those who live in cities are better off than those in
the countryside simply because almost all the better-off people live in town,
thereby skewing comparative statistical analysis.
In 1971, the Executive Board gave its approval to the social policy
recommendations of a special study into problems of urban poverty".
Gradually a portfolio of projects for deprived urban areas—in Egypt, Ecuador,
India, Indonesia and Zambia—was assembled. In 1978, a second report—
'Basic Services for Children of the Urban Poor'—was prepared12. This report
came at a time when enthusiasm for new, people-centred doctrines was at its
height and reflected the 'alternative' thinking of the time. Thus the develop122
CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
ment of a coherent Unicef approach towards children in slum neighbourhoods
and the creation of a worldwide programme with a shared perspective was very
much a part of the emerging 'basic services' approach then dominating
Unicef's perspective.
One of the landmark programmes in the formative years of 'urban basic
services' was to be found in the bustis—pocket slums—of Hyderabad, India's
fifth largest city. First supported by Unicef in 1976, the project was run by
Hyderabad's municipal staff, which included veterans of India's community
development experience13.
The Hyderabad team concentrated on building a spirit of busti cooperation
before trying to upgrade housing and other physical amenities. They fostered
human development: welfare committees, youth clubs, women's self-help
groups. Their resources were extremely slim—a factor to which much of their
success was later attributed: they could not afford to do things for people, only
with them, but they did not stint on time and energy, especially in the early
stages. Whatever activities they undertook had to be sounded out with the
community via a representative and democratic mechanism in which not only
men but women participated. The role in slum development played by the
Hyderabad municipal team was that of'facilitator', then a relatively novel role
for project managers.
No activity proceeded without there first being a clear statement of
neighbourhood need and commitment. Welfare and economic activities took
the lead: preschools (balwadis), women's mutual aid, cooperatives for rickshaw
drivers and papad makers, loans to informal sector workers such as
washerwomen. Busti committees were formed and training provided. In time
the project was expanded to cover all Hyderabad's 450 slums (500,000 inhabitants)
and housing improvement was added. Those 'squatting' on government
land were given deeds to their plots and low-interest loans from the banks. By
1984, around 13,000 new houses had been built, all but 10 per cent of the cost
being provided by the householders14. This could never have happened unless
a spirit of self-help and community endeavour had not first been created.
The Hyderabad project was one of those linchpin projects that help to
fashion an entirely new approach to a major social problem. Within India, this
strategy for slum improvement was rapidly taken up as a model, and over a
brief period of years became a blueprint for nationwide urban renewal. Unicef
played an important facilitating role in developing the Indian urban basic
services strategy. Between 1981 and 1984, it was extended to 42 towns and
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 123
cities; then to 168 towns during the seventh Five-Year Plan period (1985-89);
and finally, during the eighth Plan (1990-94), to 500 new towns and cities15.
Over 15 years, Unicef's role in funding has been progressively reduced and
taken over by central and state governments. The community-based methodology
has been consistently refined, and new interventions—immunization services,
for example—introduced16. What is now known as the Urban Basic
Services for the Poor (UBSP) programme is a remarkable example of Unicef's
involvement in a pioneering approach sensitive to the needs of women and
children that is later adopted and absorbed into the public policy mainstream.
Today, Unicef continues to provide support to UBSP, but in more of a 'back
room' way: funds for training and monitoring cells at the state and national
levels, and the preparation of information and educational materials.
The Hyderabad project not only had future ramifications within India; it
provided a forceful illustration of the fact that slums and squatter settlements
were not parasitic growths on the city fit only for condemnation, but a response,
often a very adequate response, to their inhabitants' situation. Many slum
residents were determined and upwardly mobile. Far from getting in the city's
economic way, they were anxious to work hard in petty trading, manufacturing
or service ventures—as drivers, domestic servants, fast-food vendors, stallholders.
That they met their own needs for jobs, housing and utilities against
official hostility was an indication of resourcefulness, not a black mark against
them. What was needed was to channel their energies and resources, to build on
an existing community base, however fragile, and to remove obstacles—
insecurity, lack of tenure, underemployment—standing in people's way.
Up until this time, typical programmes of slum improvement had mainly
consisted of tearing down flimsy dwellings and resettling their inhabitants in
'low-cost' (actually quite expensive) high-density mass housing or 'sites and
services' schemes for self-help house construction. No attempt was normally
made to take into account the views of slum inhabitants. Like standard water
and sanitation programmes, slum clearance and urban renewal were dominated
by the physical planners and engineers. Their responsibility was to
boards of public works rather than to any representative body of those whose
habitat was being altered The results were predictable. Not only did the
installations they provided suffer from lack of maintenance and quickly become
as dilapidated as their original setting, but in some places—the squatter
compounds of Lusaka and slum communities in Madras, for instance—the
inhabitants actually organized against them17.
Unlike most municipal authorities, and donors such as the World Bank and
bilateral agencies, Unicef did not see the 'software' of urban basic services as an
124 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
extra, and somewhat inferior, component compared to the glories of buildings,
roads and drains. Community consultation and organization were the foundation
on which multisectoral service delivery could be built. Physical improvements
should be introduced only when the community was ready. This kind of
reversal was very difficult to put across to local engineers and those used to
centralized planning and pre-established schedules. To them, community involvement
was simply a means of ensuring local people's cooperation in construction
and maintenance, a source of cost recovery and free labour for
installations pre-planned on their behalf. They did not see it as the precondition
of a successful transformation of the squalid, cramped and unhealthy
urban scene.
Unicef's commitment to 'planning from below' demanded that priorities be
established by the community and that the 'facilitating partners'—from
different sectors and administrative levels—respond on a flexible basis. Such
ideas epitomized the ideological correctness of the late 1970s that elevated
people to the centre of development. But their application in schemes rather
larger than the NGO micro-project had still to be worked out. Unicef and its
implementing partners—usually government and statutory bodies—were
obliged for reasons of budgetary planning, forward purchasing and fiscal
transparency to work out expenditures ahead. Unicef's urban programmers
had to find ways of resolving the tension between this requirement and
'planning from below'. One innovation was the introduction of the 'block
grants' concept—originally in the Kampung Improvement Programme in
Indonesia18—whereby money was allocated ahead of time to 'block grants' and
called upon when suitable proposals emerged from community organizations.
Another move was to develop links with NGOs working in slum
neighbourhoods which were more able or willing than the municipality to run
services such as credit schemes and preschools.
These approaches were an extension of Unicef's commitment to flexible and
decentralized programming—and they worked. One example was a scheme for
Environmental Health and Community Development in what were known as
'the gardens'—slums—of Colombo, Sri Lanka19. The Ministry of Housing had
become convinced that community motivation was an essential ingredient of
any significant, and permanent, upgrading of 'garden' life, so the new scheme
was heavily biased towards health education. 'Health wardens', motivated young
men and women, were recruited from 'the gardens' and given a two-month
training course. Once they had gained the confidence of their local communities,
the wardens persuaded them to set up Community Development Councils.
These Councils provided the bottom layer of a three-tier consultative and
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 125
management system: 'garden', district and city. Within three years, 291 Community
Councils had been set up, and many hundreds of local men and
women were responsible at the community level for the maintenance of taps
and toilets and other preventive health activities. From these beginnings they
could in time move on to other issues: women's income-generating activities
and reducing the high level of school drop-out.
The fundamental goal of setting up this network of Councils was to wean
the slum communities from an attitude of passivity. Their meetings were a
forum to which any local resident could bring topics of common concern. The
Councils also reinforced the activities of the health wardens, backing their
immunization drives, nutrition demonstrations and 'little mothers' classes' for
unmarried teenaged girls. Members were elected to sit on the District Development
Councils and on the City Development Council. On many occasions,
their feedback convinced city officials to change the course of a project to
accommodate the views of the garden residents. Not only did the scheme
manage to raise immunization coverage to 80 per cent in 23 council wards and
bring about the mass legalization of unregistered marriages; it also helped
promote participatory democratic institutions.
In 1982, a further report—'Urban Basic Services: Reaching Children
and Women of the Urban Poor'—was submitted to the Executive Board20.
This report contained a thorough and definitive statement of 'UBS' strategy,
and was accompanied by case-studies of Unicef-assisted UBS programmes.
In some countries, the Unicef strategy and its special emphases
on flexibility and on multi-level coordination were actually beginning to
have an impact on overall urban policy for low-income areas. Urban basic
services had earned recognition in terms of cost, effectiveness and allaround
social and economic benefit.
As the 1980s progressed, experimentation in urban basic services continued.
The ingredients of programmes were similar, but the 'entry point' varied
according to diversities of setting, as did priorities. In several Latin American
schemes, the provision of day-care services or nutritious breakfasts for the
children of working mothers predominated; a project in Baldia township,
Karachi, selected soak-pit latrines as the starting-point, and later established
home-based schools for girls21; in slums in Dhaka and other major towns of
Bangladesh, a squalid and dirty environment was usually seen by slum inhabitants
as their number-one problem, and initial action centred on path-laying,
washing and laundry facilities, and handpump tube-wells22. In many schemes,
the predicament of women without sufficient money and time to care for their
children was high on the list.
126 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
The declaration of the 'child survival and development revolution at the
end of 1982 was a mixed blessing from the urban basic services perspective. In
one sense, there was a great potential for the conjugation offerees: the existence
of a basic services network in an urban area meant that an immunization
campaign or any other preventive health intervention could be organized on a
house-to-house basis relatively easily. The density of shanty-town populations,
their accessibility and their proximity to electricity and water supplies eased
logistical problems. Mass communications made it possible to put across
information and 'messages'. The city of Addis Ababa was just one of many
examples where an existing involvement in community development in slum
kebeles (neighbourhoods) could be used as the launch pad for a full-scale
metropolitan immunization effort23. Urban primary health care was integral to
UBS; child survival interventions could ride on the back of urban basic services
programmes, and this was the strategy that many Unicef country programmes
adopted.
However, there was a fundamental difference in the underlying philosophies
of the basic services and child survival approaches, a difference that had already
emerged in the debate over 'selective' versus 'comprehensive' primary health
care (see Chapter 2). This difference had to do with whether programmes
should ultimately be led by universalist analysis and prescription, making few
accommodations as to 'what' should be done—GOBI, in the case of the 'child
survival revolution'—but adjusting the 'how' according to local circumstances;
or whether both the 'what' and the 'how' of programmes should depend on a
local situation analysis, preferably one that reflected both the subjective and
objective reality of the target population. Both approaches recognized the need
for services to be demand-led, but in the first case, demand would be created
by social marketing techniques aimed at bringing about attitudinal change to
support GOBI interventions; in the second, demand was primarily expressed
by the community's articulation of its existing felt needs. In this scenario,
meeting these needs provided an 'entry point' for a range of interventions
mutually agreed upon between providers and recipients, in which child health
and survival measures would tend, but could not be guaranteed, to rank high
in the list.
At the zenith of ideological 'alternative' thinking, so discredited had doing
things for people become that the pendulum had swung to an extreme antithesis:
the only things, or the priority things, that should be done were those that
the people themselves were able to articulate—in consumer parlance, those for
which there was already demand. To many for whom 'basic services' and
'primary health care' had represented an important ideological shift, the CSD
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 127
approach, because it was prescriptive, appeared a regression to the old, discarded
way of imposing solutions on people rather than doing things with
them. They found it difficult to perceive that a push for preselected activities
could be interpreted not as an opposite and outworn strategy, but as a useful
corrective to the shortcomings of the new approach. In this interpretation, the
overriding purpose of CSD was to put the benefits of modern science and
technology at the service of the poor. Since these were by definition people
who, because they knew nothing about the benefits of modern science, did not
feel an existing 'demand' for its products, it was necessary to provide them with
the information both to sense and to articulate one.
Without doubt, Unicef's UBS strategy as expressed in 1982 was very much
in tune with the 'alternative' thinking to which GOBI and CSD were
counterposed. Until the early 1980s, Unicef had supported a policy of identifying
particular groups of children especially affected by poverty—in backward
areas, in urban slums, among ethnic minorities—and focusing services on
them. The 'child survival revolution' signalled a decline for this kind of selectivity,
as well as for the 'let the community decide' approach to service delivery.
But whatever the prominence given to GOBI interventions throughout the
1980s, most country programmes represented a mix of inspirations and strategies.
Although in some countries UBS and 'area-based' services found themselves
eclipsed, in others they were adapted to become vehicles for CSD
without losing their integrity. Certain UBS programmes—those in India, the
Philippines, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Central America and Kenya, for
example—flourished. UBS programmes helped to keep alive within Unicef the
concepts of community participation and 'basic services' that were such an
important inheritance of the 1970s24.
The quality of these programmes and their effectiveness gained Unicef
credibility with Ministries of Local Government and Municipal Authorities—
partners with clout and resources. These relationships were to prove
fruitful for child survival advocacy. In 1990, an initiative of the Italian
Committee for Unicef with 300 mayors of Italian cities set in motion the
idea of creating a worldwide movement of 'Mayors as Defenders of Children'
25. At the global level, this initiative was launched jointly by Unicef
and the Mayor of Dakar in Senegal in January 1992, at a ceremony that
included 20 mayors and municipal leaders from 16 different countries.
They pledged to take up the challenge of preparing municipal Plans of
Action in line with the national programmes of action currently under
development as an outcome of the World Summit for Children. A second
colloquium of Mayors was held in July 1993 in Mexico City, and a third in
128 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
Paris in December 1994 at the invitation of Mayor Jacques Chirac, in
collaboration with the French Committee for UniceP6.
In the final decades of the 20th century, whatever the position of the urban
child on Unicef's organizational agenda and however muted the enthusiasm at
headquarters level for strong promotion of the urban basic services strategy,
every day a higher proportion of the world's people were becoming citydwellers.
Urban children had to be included as a Unicef programming target,
whether as part of a universalist strategy or as a specific group. And among
urban children, one group was becoming daily more visible: those who had
taken to working and living on the streets.
During the 1980s, the structural problems of poverty prevailing in most cities
of the developing world were exacerbated by economic crisis and recession.
Here was a new strain to add to the existing configuration of rapid population
growth and rapid urbanization27.
In an attempt to plug the economic dike, many countries adopted drastic
measures as part of International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue packages.
Subsidies and price controls on food and other essentials were removed; employment
in government and municipal establishments was reduced; public
investment programmes and social expenditures were cut. The brunt of'adjustment'
was borne disproportionately by the urban poor. One result was a
mushrooming growth in the number of people seeking work in the informal
sector—as market porters, street vendors, stall-holders, street-walkers, carwashers,
rickshaw drivers, scavengers, fast-food suppliers—and an increase in
the number of people forced to seek work in servile and unprotected occupations.
A conspicuous feature of this volatile, disorganized and statistically
elusive workforce was that it contained a high proportion of women and
youth. Some of its participants were no older than five or six, and many were
in their early teens28.
The growth of cities in the developing world and the increasing hardship
experienced by many of their inhabitants were altering the terms of family life.
In the traditional rural setting, children participated in the daily working
round on the land or in the household as an integral part of their upbringing.
As soon as she could walk, the small girl in rural Asia or Africa collected twigs
for fuel or carried a tiny water jar. The young boy herded goats or assisted his
father in the workshop. Few occupations in the modern city lent themselves to
a parallel process of learning and working under family tutelage. But the need
for all members of the family to contribute to the household economy was as
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 129
severe, if not more so, because cash was needed for all basic necessities: food,
shelter, water, fuel. So as soon as the child accompanying her or his mother to
the market stall in Lagos or Lima, Bombay or Brazzaville, could carry a tray,
run errands or mind the stall, earning became part of daily routine.
Even if the youngster's working life began at a parent's side, it rarely stayed
that way. In most cities a hierarchy of informal occupations developed, some of
which were dominated by the young—usually by boys but occasionally by girls
as well: flower girls, parking boys, vendors of newspapers or chewing-gum
through car windows, scavenging on city garbage heaps, collecting fares on
taxis, selling artefacts to tourists. Many such occupations exposed youngsters
to hazardous influences, especially accidents29. As the children became caught
up in the street world, their peers often began to exert more affective influence
than parents. As the bonds of family life weakened, children might gravitate to
a lifestyle centred on the street, the railway station, the promenade or the
dazzling shopping complex. Some became separated from their families altogether,
taking up an open-air or doorway abode, sleeping rough, living rough
and sometimes descending into drugs, alcohol and crime.
During their own period of rapid urbanization in the 19th century, the
cities of Europe and North America had similarly nurtured their populations
of barrow-boys, waifs and strays, and their gangs of miniature hooligans. Until
a relatively advanced stage of the urbanization and industrialization process in
the developing world, the presence of children on the street and in the marketplace
was so familiar a feature of the urban landscape that it had barely
attracted notice. But as their numbers rose, and as in some cities their presence
began to feel not only ubiquitous but threatening, the late 20th century
rediscovered these child victims of poverty-stricken urban sprawl as 'street
children'. This label principally described the venue in which they were noticed
and their dirty and unkempt appearance; it implied a mix of abandonment,
vagrancy and youthful criminality.
The phenomenon was most evident in Latin America, where by the end of
the 1970s two thirds of the population was urbanized. Some estimates—much
of the early information about street children was speculative—put the number
of children living wholly or partially without parental support in Latin America
and the Caribbean in the many millions. Of these, between 5 and 10 per cent
were children whose living, eating, working and sleeping place was the street,
the rubbish dump, the car park and the deserted building30. Whatever the true
dimensions of the problem, the numbers implied that the city was becoming
increasingly antithetical to childhood and that the scale of family dislocation
within the urbanization process demanded a public policy response. Most
130 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
efforts to respond to the urban child in distress were still limited to religious
and charitable social welfare, or outdated systems of institutional incarceration
that amounted to an even worse abuse of childhood than street life itself.
During the International Year of the Child in 1979, many problems relating
to children—exploitation, abuse, child prostitution, children on the streets—
that had previously been denied or ignored by city authorities projecting a
travel poster image were given an international airing. One of those imperceptible
changes in the moral climate began to occur. The exposure of child
maltreatment—which happened in industrialized as well as developing countries—
might cause national embarrassment and offend national pride, but
even quite touchy governments were beginning to acknowledge diat such
practices were wrong and that steps should be taken to stop them. Reluctantly
at first because it had feared antagonizing governmental partners, Unicef began
to assist in the exposure of these child protection issues by providing fora—
publications, meetings—in which they could be discussed31. Fuelled by European
NGOs, the debate moved rapidly forward and Unicef found itself under
pressure to get programmatically involved. Street children were the obvious
starting-point.
In 1981, Peter Tagon, a Canadian who had been working with street children
in Latin America for several years, was appointed by Unicef to conduct a
situation analysis on street children in the Americas region and recommend a
course of action. Tagon was instrumental in gaining recognition for street
children's perception of their own reality: that they were workers, not vagabonds,
and not out of choice but of necessity; that their values were the values
of survival, not of conscient criminals and thugs. Tagon did more than any
other single person to speak out sympathetically for street children and put
their cause on the international map. He was an advocate, and exemplar, of the
thesis that such children needed, above all, support in their working and
personal lives, not adult rejection and condemnation. Street children needed to
stay with their families or be offered alternative family settings, not to be thrust
into corrective institutions whose likely outcome was to harden their resistance
to the rules of society, completing their marginalization and making their
delinquency a foregone conclusion. Tagon left Unicef in 1986 to set up
Childhope International, an organization dedicated to the street child's cause.
The problem was at its most prolific and its scariest in the cities of Brazil. In
1981, Peter Tagon accompanied Brazilian officials from die Ministry of Social
Assistance and Welfare and FUNABEM, the national body responsible for
abandoned children, on a visit to NGOs around the country working with
street children in unconventional ways32. The result was a project funded by
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 131
CIDA and the Canadian Committee for Unicef, initially for two years: the
Alternative Programme for Street Children. This was the first Unicef-assisted,
government-backed effort to offer technical support to NGOs working with
street-based children and their families. The project team saw themselves as
facilitators of community responses to a social problem, not as a new street
children's organization. They held meetings and workshops for NGO personnel,
offered training, brought isolated groups into communication with one
another and enabled the members of a growing network to build a strong
organizational base33.
To counter the official inclination to view the street child problem from a
delinquency perspective, the project managed to create a 'policy dissonance,
instituting within the public sector a counterweight to its own existing policies
and programmes in order to challenge and change them'34. It also helped build
up an attitude of public ownership of the street child issue. By 1986, voluntary
bodies made up of individuals and organizations acting on behalf of street
children had been set up in many Brazilian cities to defend them from abuse,
maltreatment, even murder. These bodies were able to mobilize resources for
all kinds of activities—street education, soup kitchens, sports and recreation,
preschools—as well as mount vigorous campaigns on behalf of children's rights.
An increasing number of Unicef country offices—in India, Kenya, Ecuador,
Guatemala, the Philippines and elsewhere—were becoming exercised about
urban children in distress. Although the 'child survival revolution' was just
getting into its stride and the Unicef upper echelon was anxious that organizational
energy and resources not be swept hither and yon, some contemporary
issues concerning children could not be ignored. In the aftermath of the
International Year of the Child, certain Unicef Executive Board members were
not prepared to let issues it had brought into the open fade away, nor did the
international political and economic climate give any cause for complacency.
One of those who persistently championed the protection of children from the
fallout of man's inhumanity to man in all contexts in which children's vulnerability
laid them open to special deprivation was Nils Thedin, the leading
delegate of Sweden and a senior statesman of Unicef.
In 1984, on the fifth anniversary of the IYC, an NGO forum was held
alongside the Unicef Executive Board annual session, meeting in Rome35. This
created pressure on behalf of street children and other categories 'in especially
difficult circumstances'. The Board therefore asked that a special policy review
be undertaken on programmes relating to children suffering from disadvantages
typically associated with poverty, but extra to poverty itself. A two-year
process of study and collective review began. After discussion, it was decided
132 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
that the catch-all phrase 'children in especially difficult circumstances' (CEDC)
should cover street and working children, abused and neglected children and
child victims of armed conflict36. Among these categories, street children were
the most prominent as a new target of Unicef programming. This was not
because they were necessarily the worst off, but because they were highly
visible, there was growing public and philanthropic interest in their plight and
they had become a symbol worldwide of the rediscovery of children outside the
health and survival framework as an international cause cftebre.
Economic stress and the necessity of children working to help support dieir
families were now increasingly seen as the dynamics behind the street child
phenomenon. As a result, the Unicef policy review was prepared with the
cooperation of the International Labour Office (ILO). This partner organization
within the UN system had long been concerned with the abolition and
regulation of child work, primarily via advocacy and international labour
conventions. The policy review also provided an opportunity for multi-organizational
discussions on child protection in different parts of the world. Increasingly,
NGOs were being seen as die front-line organizations for CEDC, with
Unicef helping to bring government and municipalities into a technically
supportive role—the pattern pioneered in Brazil.
Unicef could also play a role alongside ILO at the international level in
advocacy and research, helping to act as an instigator and facilitator of local
child-centred NGO associations and occasionally to act as moderator between
campaigning NGOs and the officialdom they challenged. Unicef s engagement
in programming and advocacy on behalf of street children presaged a deepening
of the relationship with the NGO community commenced under UBS—a
relationship that was less paternal and ceremonial, more equitable and respectful
of NGOs' comparative advantages than had often been the case in the past.
The 1986 report to the Board on 'Children in Especially Difficult Circumstances'
took the line that child work per se was not the problem; that work was
a natural part of growing up. It stated: 'It is largely through work, usually in a
family context, diat children become socialized and learn adult skills and
responsibilities. But child work becomes exploitative if it threatens his physical,
mental, emotional or social development.'37 Research showed that most street
children were neither abandoned nor runaway; they turned out to be living at
home, even if 'home' was not the safe and protected haven that childhood
deserved. A distinction was drawn between 'children on the street'—children
working in the open-air economy and still integrated with their families; and
'children of the street'—the 5 to 10 per cent who had run away from home or
been rejected. Families stressed by poverty to the point of sending a 12-year-old
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 133
son off to shine shoes or scavenge trash needed an approach different from
children reduced to begging and petty theft as a means of independent survival.
In countries where programmes for urban basic services existed, the candidate
families in the slums were the same families whose children had a tendency
to drop out of school and ended up roaming shopping malls looking for
ways to earn money. In such settings, urban basic services and efforts on behalf
of street and working children naturally converged. This was the case in the
Philippines, where a UBS programme had been taking shape in experimental
form since 198338.
During the early 1980s, as economic recession bit deep into Filipino urban
pockets, the phenomenon of children adopting public spaces as their regular
haunts began to grow more conspicuous. To begin with, the civic authorities
greeted the increasing presence of children on the streets with old-style punitive
responses, flinging these young transgressors into jail. Gradually, the Department
of Social Welfare began to realize that—as with the eviction of
squatter populations from illegally occupied land—the forces propelling children
onto the streets were not susceptible to the coercive removal of the
victims. In 1984, senior child welfare officials visited Brazil at Unicef's invitation
to see what happened when a programme was sensitive to the street child's
world view and repudiated institutionalization in favour of family and community
reintegration. This marked the beginning of an attitudinal and policy
transformation.
In 1986, sweeping political change came to the Philippines with the election
of President Corazon Aquino. The new administration pledged to do much
more for the poor—and much more for children. With some behind-thescenes
prompting from Unicef, a 'Year for the Protection of Filipino Exploited
Children was declared for 1986-87. The Council for the Welfare of Children
was revitalized and given the task of reforming Philippine policies towards
street and working children. In a society with a deeply ingrained view of
poverty as antisocial and reprobate, such changes could not take place overnight.
Police who overzestfully rounded up 'truants' needed re-education; antiquated
laws that imprisoned children alongside adult offenders needed replacement;
and city halls had to be persuaded that policies towards the urban child
in distress would be more effective if they were more humane.
Just as the cause of street children gained ground in the new political
environment, so did urban basic services. A Presidential Commission on the
Urban Poor was set up to coordinate programmes for slum improvement.
Between 1988 and 1992, the Unicef-assisted urban basic services programme
targeted over 1 million children under six years old, over 200 mothers and
134 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
35,000 street children in the poorest barangays (neighbourhoods) in 10 cities.
As well as each city hall, the Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor and
hundreds of NGOs and urban poor associations were involved39.
The participatory process at the heart of UBS in the Philippines was centred—
as in the case of all successful Unicef-backed initiatives—on the fabric of
people's lives. Instead of officialdom making an assessment of what the community
needed and then delivering improved roads, drains and buildings, the
community itself was responsible for assessing needs and drawing up appropriate
plans. The hallmark of the process in a neighbourhood or sub-neighbourhood
(barangay or purok) was evidence of community self-monitoring: the presence
in a prominent place of a large board on which were displayed the demographic
and social indicators of the locality. These included the number of families and
children, immunization coverage, the number of mothers receiving livelihood
loans and the number of children enrolled in the scholarship programme that
kept them away from the lure of the streets. Community assessment, service
delivery and monitoring were matters fully in the public domain.
Based on its initial survey and analysis, the Barangay Development Committee
drew up an improvement plan. Once completed, the plan was forwarded
to the city authorities, and after the necessary consultations with
health, education and other departments, it entered the overall city plan for
urban basic services. When the necessary resources had been allocated from
various budgets and from Unicef, the plan could go into implementation.
With guidance and material inputs from the appropriate departments, the
Barangay Development Committee and its subcommittees for health, sanitation
and so on carried it out. Technical guidance—training, advising, capacitybuilding—
was often provided by an NGO.
In Olongapo, a city notorious for a 'hospitality industry' set up to cater to
the off-duty needs of American servicemen at Subic Bay, twin programmes for
UBS and street children emerged in the late 1980s. Among the barangay
subcommittees set up in the communities was one to deal with street children.
Within UBS, families with street children were among those identified for
special loans and scholarships. At the same time, street educators from a
project known as 'Reach-up' worked directly with the 400 or so children who
had lost contact with their families. They provided basic education and a cheap
daily meal, and helped child workers form occupational associations: plastic
bag vendors, pushcart boys, scavengers and bus-washers 'unions'. The entry
point for preventive and protective work directed at children under stress was
both the street and the family; the combination meant that the epidemic of
children lured into street life could be checked.
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 135
For many NGOs around the world working with street children, the immediate
concern was loss of education. The Undugu Society of Kenya, one of the
earliest organizations to work with Africa's street children, in this case with
Nairobi's parking boys, regarded children on the street primarily as out-ofschoolers
and set up community schools at which they could make good their
loss of educational opportunity40. The Underprivileged Children's Educational
Project (UCEP) in Bangladesh similarly focused on basic education, leading on
to vocational training in carpentry, electronics, tailoring and secretarial skills41.
Shelter was a concern of many NGOs. A great number of small, local
philanthropic organizations all over Asia and Latin America ran drop-in centres
for street children where they could wash, cook themselves a meal, play
board games and attend literacy classes if they wished. Another priority was
health: Project Alternatives (Projecto Alternatives) in Tegucigalpa, Honduras,
took as its entry point 'street PHC', alongside basic education, psychosocial
counselling, and community kitchens. Many NGOs also worked with the
families of street children, trying to support parent-child relationships and
help cash-starved mothers create a better domestic base. In the Philippines,
Brazil, Kenya and India, national and city fora of street children's organizations
began to work with police training institutions to reduce police violence
against street children. In Syria, the police themselves initiated programmes of
street child activity42.
An increasing number of Unicef offices began to develop working relationships
with the growing number of NGOs—both new ones brought
into existence by the problem and old ones newly taking it up—providing
services for children on the streets. In most cases, the approach adopted
was similar: elastic, unstructured, aimed at building networks and capacity
among NGOs, welding their existing efforts into the equivalent of a rather
anarchic programme, guiding technically and topping-up financially but
not superimposing an unwanted managerial direction. Sometimes this
worked well as an enabling and motivating process; sometimes it did not.
Bringing diverse NGOs together—Moslems with Christians, soft-spoken
nuns with activist firebrands, highly professional executives with untrained
amateurs—to develop a joint action plan was difficult enough, let alone
persuading them to work with officialdom and vice versa. Sometimes differences
were irreconcilable and the role of the coordinating body—arbiter?
manager? clearing-house?—never crystallized.
In India, Unicef felt its way slowly into a strategy, fostering the establishment
of NGO fora on street children in the large cities. These were open and
democratic grass-roots networks of organizations involved with street children.
136 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
In Calcutta, it took until 1992 to make the city NGO Forum on Street
Children fully operational43. At a workshop convened by Unicef, 45 assorted
NGOs pooled information about their activities and capacities. Out of diis a
citywide picture of what was being done for street children emerged, as well as
a plan of how different groups could supplement each others services. The
NGOs were gradually able to expand their total reach among the many thousands
of street children in Calcutta geographically, demographically and by
type of intervention, at very little extra cost. Unicef s role in all of this was to
underpin, facilitate, pay some joint costs, mediate and make sure that city hall
and its departments duly shared responsibility.
By the early 1990s, Unicef had developed methodologies for researching the
situation of children in the streets (leading to studies in Dhaka, Mexico City,
Quito, Bombay, Madras and elsewhere) and had accumulated a large body of
programmatic knowledge. What had evolved was a loose-leaf approach, not a
tight policy witJi systematic guidelines. NGOs small and large, some of which
had previously kept aloof from government and Unicef, had discovered the
usefulness of enrolling an intergovernmental organization in their cause44. On
its side, Unicef had entered into a new kind of partnership with the NGO
community, initially via UBS but more thoroughly and pervasively through
the street child issue.
Although at headquarters level Unicef was still reserving its most powerful
guns for child survival and was therefore a rather muted champion of children
in especially difficult circumstances, this was an issue whose star had risen
independently, developing an international momentum of its own. Urban
poverty was one part of the picture. The other was the fact that CEDC were,
above all, children in need of protection. Their cause was therefore right at the
heart of the effort to articulate, and carry onto the international statute book,
the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
During the period in which Unicef began to recognize that the pervasiveness of
children working on city streets required coherent policy and programmatic
action, the child-related NGO community was becoming increasingly vocal.
The IYC had prompted research into the plight of many disadvantaged groups,
and these predicaments the NGOs now sought to bring further into the
international and media spotlight. The two most prominent categories of
children attracting their attention were street children, whose multiple predicaments
ran the gamut of child protection problems: abandonment, homelessness,
exploitation, hazardous work, risk of sexual enticement, drugs, vagrancy, crime,
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 137
trouble with the law; and child victims of warfare and other types of emergency45.
The language of child-related protest was changing in tone. To the
traditional emotionalism of appeals on behalf of children was being added the
vocabulary of social justice and human rights.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the NGO community saw an international
convention on children's rights as a key instrument and campaigning basis for
the protection of childhood from the stresses of the contemporary world.
During the 1980s, the NGOs maintained strong pressure on the post-IYC
intergovernmental drafting group set up under UN auspices to develop a text
for such a convention46. As more governments—notably the Swedish and
Canadian—began to give their backing, by the mid-1980s the realization of a
convention appeared a distinct possibility.
Through Defence for Children International, the NGOs' umbrella body on
child rights, human rights organizations and specialists in international law
became involved. The NGOs also asked Unicef to take a more active part in
the process: it had, after all, been designated by the General Assembly as lead
agency in the UN system for IYC follow-up. Nevertheless, Unicef's position
throughout the first half of the 1980s remained that of passive observer. It
helped the NGOs by convening meetings and offering facilities in Geneva,
which allowed them to hammer out their positions. But the idea of a convention
was not one to which Unicef was itself—initially at least—institutionally
seriously committed47.
Under Jim Grant's leadership, Unicef had become much more involved
in—and professional at—advocacy, especially in support of the 'child survival
revolution'. However, this was not the same kind of campaigning advocacy in
which many activist NGOs engaged. To Unicef, delivery of concrete benefits
to children was the most important task; the advocacy it engaged in was
normally an attempt to leverage certain principles and practice—those exemplified
in its own programme—into broader public policy. Advocacy to Unicef
was not a matter of exposure, critique and campaigns for political or legislative
reform.
The campaigning NGOs operated in a very different culture. In the case of
many rights issues—sexual exploitation, abuse and neglect, servitude, economic
exploitation—their standard response was to undertake advocacy on
behalf of civil liberties, or on versions of civil liberties not yet universally
absorbed into cultural and legal systems. Unicef was inhibited by its intergovernmental
character from engaging, or wishing to engage, in this kind of
confrontational campaign. Its emphasis was on programming, and in the case
of CEDC, its programming approach was still embryonic. It had yet to view
138 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
an incipient convention on children's rights as an instrument that could support
existing programmatic activity or open up new programme opportunities.
What perhaps was not understood in Unicef's New York headquarters was
the degree to which, within the European perspective, the language of human
rights had already begun to be co-opted into the development discourse.
Campaigns on what in the US were traditionally seen as two quite separate sets
of issues—the one political, the other social and economic—had on the other
side of the Atlantic begun to converge. A structural analysis of poverty in the
South had, by the early 1980s, come to dominate development thinking in
intellectual circles and leading NGOs, not only in Europe but in Latin America
and elsewhere48. This suggested that without the kind of democratic changes
that would unsettle the domination of power in much of the South by elites—
class elites, racial or ethnic elites, elites fashioned economically by the workings
of the Western capitalist system, or politically by the machinations of both
Eastern and Western blocs—the development process would continue to discriminate
against the poor. This was the era of heightened international opposition
to South African apartheid and US intervention in Central America, and
the establishment of safeguards for human rights was seen in such settings as a
sine qua non of equitable human development. But these settings were only the
most conspicuous instances of the natural convergence of the rights and development
agendas; the principle was general.
If the development debate was moving on, so was the debate about childhood.
The terms of family life and upbringing were undergoing seismic change,
especially, but not exclusively, in the developing world49. One of the fundamental
influences was the 20th-century decline in infant mortality, made
possible by rising prosperity and the spread of life-saving medical and public
health technologies. This decline had already made the brunt of its impact felt
in the industrialized world. In the poorer parts of the world, as Unicef's call for
a 'child survival revolution' had underlined, this transition with all its potential
impacts on family structure and reproductive behaviour was far from complete.
Increased child survival led to a preference for small families; this in turn
led to a much larger parental investment in each individual child.
At the same time had come a corresponding demand from parents that the
State should fulfil its share of the raising of the new generation by investing in
maternal and infant care, education, child care, family planning and family
support. In the past 50 to 100 years, childhood had undergone an expansion in
every direction. It had lengthened in years and become more protected; it had
become in the eyes of society a vitally important passage in which investment
could not be skimped; children's upbringing had become a major target of
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 139
social policy, scientific inquiry and popular debate. A revolution had occurred
in which the child had become the quality product of the industrialized and
industrializing society50.
At the same time, many pressures on family life were ambiguous at best in
terms of their outcome for children—especially since children had now become
the repository of high levels of parental hope and expectation. The
growth of commercialism and material expectations that accompanied rapid
urbanization and the drive for educational qualifications exacerbated individualism
and pressures on the family purse. Evolution in labour and employment
markets was everywhere making the future for young people potentially more
exciting, but also much more uncertain and insecure. Women's demand for
equality with men was helping to reduce male oppression within the family
and society; but there were repercussions on the stability of homes and married
life. The number of women raising children on their own was rising all over the
world, as were divorce rates; there were increases in reported domestic violence,
drug use, alcoholism and juvenile crime. There was also an effect on family
structure of the new preoccupation with the individual's rights over his or her
sexuality: precocious sex, postponement of marriage, and more frequent, or
more frequent exposure of, child sexual abuse. Since the advent of the middleclass
industrial society in the late 19th century, childhood had been mythologized
as an idyll of pre-adult bliss, governed by the postponement of maturity
in a cocoon of discipline, innocence and love. Now childhood was in turmoil.
It was increasingly apparent that a large number of children, even in wellheeled
societies with their growing 'underclass', experienced childhood as a
time of deprivation, psychosocial distress and broken promise.
The pursuit of rights as a rallying cry helped redefine the children's cause. It
provided a framework in which to view childhood universally, across cultures
and societies, across the North-South, rich-poor divides. It stripped away the
welfarist connotations that had clung to the children debate in spite of the
efforts of Unicef and some others to centralize it in a world poverty and
development perspective. In most intellectual settings, such an idea had never
been truly persuasive. In spite of the common use of the suffering African or
Asian child in charitable appeals, children were mostly seen by development
analysts and campaigners for solidarity with the South as too sentimental an
object for serious attention. The rights dimension gave a much sharper edge to
the children's cause and the inherent value system associated with championing
the child. The chord it struck brought on board a new and wider constituency.
The pressure from the European NGOs and some of the National Committees
for Unicef to be more active on behalf of child rights and the incipient
140 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
Convention was communicated strongly to the 1984 Executive Board meeting
by the parallel NGO Forum51. This thrust to widen the Unicef agenda was not
altogether welcomed by the Unicef secretariat at a relatively early stage in the
promulgation of GOBI and the 'child survival and development revolution',
which was after all a purposeful attempt to narrow the focus in a very different
direction. Grant was personally sceptical at this stage of events that governments—
especially the US Government—would really, when faced with it, be
willing to back an international instrument that entitled children—by definition
minors who do not vote—to claim rights, independently of parents and
adults52. However, the mood of the Board itself was more positive. It was this
same Board meeting that set in motion the study into 'children in especially
difficult circumstances'.
The turning point in Unicef's willingness to throw its weight behind the
Convention came during 1985-86. The handful of those in Unicef who passionately
believed that the passage of a Convention deserved Unicef's wholehearted
support finally convinced Jim Grant that the time had come to get
more actively involved. An important ally was Philip Alston, a lawyer who had
been on the staff of die UN Centre for Human Rights and made a specialization of
the application of international human rights legislation to children; he now
became an influential Unicef adviser. Grant sent his Deputy Executive Director for
External Relations, Tarzie Vittachi, to the 1986 drafting group session to
indicate a different level of Unicef intent. And the debate on the CEDC review
at the 1986 Executive Board meeting gave an important boost to organizational
involvement: the Board Chairman, Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh,
an advocate of the Convention, managed to obtain the passage of a resolution
committing Unicef to greater involvement in die drafting process53.
The critical point of persuasion as far as Grant was concerned was that a
Convention could be used to underpin the 'child survival and development
revolution'. He had perceived the Convention as heavily emphasizing die
protection of exploited and abused children, and believed that many governments
would be antagonized by an international legal instrument diat confronted
them with their failures. Once he was persuaded that rights on behalf
of child survival and development could be included, he became attracted by
the idea that signatory countries could be obliged to shoulder mandatory
obligations to undertake immunization campaigns and other child survival
actions. However, for this potential to be realized, die draft Convention needed
considerable amendment.
Up until 1987 the draft contained no mention of 'the child's right to
survival', and less than adequate mention of rights to health care, food and
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 141
nutrition, education and minimum standards of social provision. If these
rights could be fully articulated, the Convention would become an enduring
mechanism for gathering political will behind GOBI, CSD and subsequent
child-related human development campaigns. During 1987, suitable amendments
were introduced into the draft text, and a target date of 1989—the 30th
anniversary of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the 10th anniversary
of the IYC—was set for the Convention's passage54.
Over the next two years, Unicef threw the formidable powers of advocacy it
had originally developed to promote the 'child survival revolution' behind the
movement to pass the Convention into law. Grant pushed the Convention at
ECOSOC, at other intergovernmental fora, within the UN system, and by
personal initiative among Ambassadors at the UN of the more reluctant member
states. He also began to bring it into his speeches at meetings of all kinds
and on every continent, enlisting the support of First Ladies, professional
associations, parliamentarians, NGOs, the press and television media. It was at
this time that the Unicef State of the World's Children reports began to talk of a
'new ethos for children, a new worldwide awareness and concern, a powerful
"sea-change" in what world opinion considers to be morally acceptable and
what it does not'55. Both the gains of the 'child survival revolution and the
forthcoming Convention were attributed to the 'onward march of ethics with
awareness, morality with capacity'. This was a theme that Grant was to develop
in the period leading up to the Children's Summit and far beyond.
Within Unicef, a Convention Task Force developed contacts with government
delegations, set up an information service for country offices and National
Committees, and generally saw that the Convention was internally
perceived as having a high priority for advocacy. Unicef Goodwill Ambassadors
were encouraged to mention the Convention in their Unicef public
appearances. A combined Unicef/DCI Information Kit was produced and
widely distributed. Some National Committees were important movers and
shakers for the Convention from a relatively early stage. One of these was the
Italian Committee led by the energetic Aldo Farina. With the NGO Committee
for Unicef, the Italian Committee hosted a meeting in Lignano in September
1987 that attracted the participation of 120 representatives of NGOs and
National Committees. This meeting helped to recruit to the cause a wide
NGO constituency and bring on board some of the Unicef National Committees
that were still hesitant about engaging in such a potentially controversial
area as children's rights56.
One of the most important tasks perceived by Unicef was to mobilize
support for the Convention in the developing world. Unicef representatives all
142 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
over Africa, Asia and Latin America made approaches at senior levels in government
and simultaneously developed programmes of events to sensitize the
general public. As a result of these approaches, a number of new national
bodies were created to examine the text of the Convention from a technical,
legal and cultural perspective, and conferences, workshops and symposia were
held. Examples included a meeting on Children in Armed Conflict in Kenya
in July 1987 under the auspices of the African Network on Prevention and
Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), followed by another
on Child Rights the following year; 1988 saw the formation of an
intersectoral group on the Convention in Mozambique and of an Asian Task
Force on the Convention in Bangkok. In Buenos Aires, NGOs from all over
Latin America met to review the proposed Convention and drafted a Latin
American Charter on the Rights of the Child. In Egypt, a National Council for
Childhood and Motherhood was set up with First Lady Suzanne Mubarak at
its head, and a national conference on the Convention was held in Alexandria
in November 1988. All of these activities brought in new partners on behalf of
children, especially lawyers and academics for whom the championship of
childhood was a novel concern.
They also helped build support within government, which was translated
into diplomatic backing for resolutions at international meetings. Special fora
on children's rights were held among established regional groups of countries
such as the OAU (Organization of African Unity), ASEAN (Association of
South-East Asian Nations) and SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation); the Summit meetings of SAARC were the first to endorse the
Convention at such a prestigious level. In all this activity, close cooperation
was maintained with the Centre on Human Rights, whose administrative role
vis-a-vis the Convention had to be duly respected. This was not a Unicef
product, even if Unicef inevitably became the UN agency most visibly associated,
given its mandate for children and its worldwide capacity for advocacy
and social mobilization.
In 1988, the Working Group met for two extended sessions to complete the
review of the text and the drafting process. Prior to these meetings, Unicef
organized informal consultations that allowed NGOs and others not members
of governmental delegations to make an input in the run-up to a finished text.
The Article that caused the most friction during these final stages concerned
the involvement of children in armed conflict, in particular the age of recruitment
into the armed forces. In spite of some delegations' reservations about
settling for weaker protections than those already enunciated in other international
instruments simply in order to achieve consensus, the final text was
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 143
adopted unanimously in the Working Group and therefore went forward to its
formal procedural fate—through ECOSOC, the Third Committee (on social
and humanitarian affairs) and to its final staging post in the UN General
Assembly—without need for further debate. There is no question that it is a
major triumph, one often overlooked, to achieve consensus among upwards of
160 nations on a text, particularly one due to pass into international law. The
transcendence of children as an issue—their big political card—helped to work
its magic.
During the months before the 1989 General Assembly, Unicef offices accelerated
their promotion of the now definitive text and tried to pave the way for
the adoption of the Convention in the General Assembly, and the subsequent
ratification process. At Unicef headquarters, a rearguard diplomatic initiative
was conducted to head off any threat by one or other government to reopen
debate on the text, which—fortunately—did not materialize. After safe passage
through the Third Committee, the Convention was adopted in the UN General
Assembly on 20 November 1989, 30 years to the day on the anniversary of
the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. A huge party,
attended by 300 children as well as UN delegates and officials and Convention-
supporting NGOs, celebrated the victory.
On 26 January 1990, the Convention was opened for signature and 61
countries signed. This was the highest number ever to indicate an intent to
ratify a human rights instrument at the very first opportunity. In February,
Ghana became the first country to ratify the Convention. Over the next few
months, as part of the lead-up to the World Summit for Children in September,
a sufficient number of states ratified—20—to enable the Convention to
come into effect as an internationally binding treaty.
What in fact had the nations of the world accepted on behalf of children?
They had agreed upon a set of universal norms and standards to be upheld visa-
vis the upbringing and care of children, by parents and guardians, by teachers
and caregivers, by their substitutes where normal family and community mechanisms
had broken down, in appropriate consultation with children themselves;
these norms were to be sanctioned and pursued by ratifying states via national
legislation and its implementation, and their performance in so doing was to
be monitored by a panel of international experts constituting a Committee on
the Rights of the Child.
Apart from general articles supporting non-discrimination and the 'best
interests of the child' as overriding principles, the rights set out by the Convention
fell essentially under four headings: survival, development, protection and
participation. Survival rights included the rights to life and life-protective
144 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
interventions (unspecified, but understood to mean GOBI-type interventions)
and to assistance from the State in times of emergency. Development rights
included those to nurture, love, food, health care and education; and the duty
of the State to support parents' responsibilities in these contexts by social
service provision. Protection articles established the child's rights not to be
abused, neglected or exploited economically, sexually or in other ways. Participatory
articles conferred on the child the right to be consulted in matters that
affected his or her well-being, for example, in custody cases, and to have a
voice in the wider society. Not only did the Convention place new obligations
on adults vis-a-vis children, especially on the State; it took children a significant
step away from the traditional view that the young not only are the
dependants of parents (or adult substitutes) but are subject to their absolute
control until they reach the age of majority.
In one or two countries around the world, the voice of child claimants to
these rights had already made itself resoundingly heard.
Within Unicef, the rise of concern with children's rights was closely associated
with the rise of concern surrounding street children. Although the protection
of children in war- and emergency-related situations also fell within the scope
of a rights rather than welfarist framework, these were situations in which
Unicef had always been programmatically involved. To those who had difficulty
understanding what the advent of rights meant for their work and the
children's cause more generally, the need to develop programmes for children
on and of the streets was the easy path to comprehension of the changes
expected. As a result, for many years the misperception lingered in some parts
of Unicef that issues of children's rights were exclusively to do with street
children, who themselves were synonymous with CEDC. Although this confusion
was irritating to those articulating a much more significant change in the
concept of childhood and in adult-child relationships, the fact that it was so
pervasive led in part from its substance.
Children who lived on the streets often suffered abuse at the hands of the
police and in government institutions; many were unjustly deprived of their
liberty and endured blatant violations of human rights. On their own side,
they might yearn for love and affection, desire skills and education and deeply
regret the childhood and protections they had lost; but few were willing or able
to return to structured dependence on adult control after months or years of
independent and unstructured living. The freedoms and protections in connection
with children forced into a premature assumption of adult responsiCITY
STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 145
bilities and pitted against an unfriendly adult world have adult connotations
inapplicable to the child growing up in the traditional household or 'modern,
middle-class home. Not surprisingly, therefore, the issue of children's rights
surfaced most prominently around confrontations between children on the
streets and repressive—or protective, from which it is sometimes indistinguishable—
adult authority.
Perhaps the first stirrings of this confrontation should be dated from the
1976 youth rebellion in Soweto, South Africa, but this uprising of school-goers
against the injustice of an apartheid curriculum was too early to be analysed in
terms of children's rights. So the story starts instead in Brazil a few years later57.
During the early 1980s, the Brazilian military regime was preparing to make
way for civilian rule after around 20 years in power. The epidemic of children
on the streets was coincidentally reaching crisis proportions, and as a result the
expression of demands for children's rights became integrally associated with
the stirrings of legalized democracy. Apart from the numbers of children
involved (not as many as the 30 million often then quoted but still a very large
number) and extreme actions taken against some of them, including targeted
murder, this connection occurred because of the organizational networking of
those trying to support them. The process had been started by the 'Alternative
Programme for Street Children in which Unicef had been instrumental58.
The street child in his or her twin guise of social menace and victim was a
symptom of the ingrained poverty not only tolerated but structurally reinforced
by the old patriarchal and militaristic order. To many Brazilians, this
child appeared a potent symbol of a society in need of radical change. Boys and
girls who had not passed school age, in many cases had not passed puberty, had
been let down by their families and society and were now undergoing brutalization
and criminalization on the streets. At a time of feverish political activity,
the acutely deprived and socially damaged child became a burning issue,
and one around which disparate groups rediscovering the joys and travails of
democratic participation managed to coalesce.
In 1985, voluntary state bodies on behalf of street children elected the first
National Commission of what was to become a National Movement for Street
Boys and Girls. The following year, representatives from street and working
children's groups assembled in Brasilia for the First National Street Children's
Congress. The event, which gave its participants a chance to voice their concerns,
particularly the increase in violence against them, resulted in a blaze of
publicity. For the first time, street children were projected in something other
than a negative light—as potential contributors to society. The meeting also
positioned the National Street Children's Movement and its progenitors within
146 CHILDREN FIRST: THE STORY OF UNICEF, PAST AND PRESENT
the ranks of popular forces claiming a democratic role in the redrafting of the
Constitution, a process currently being advanced by a special Constituent
Assembly. From the perspective of Unicef, the drafting of the new Constitution
provided an ideal opportunity to secure democratic involvement in establishing
a framework for children's rights; this would underpin the continuing
need for major improvements in public policy towards children.
Unicef was making every effort at the time to use the democratization
process in Brazil to open up a children's dimension within political debate59.
This was vintage Jim Grant strategy: when a country is in a process of rapid
transition in whatever direction—right to left, left to right, military to civilian
regime or vice versa—new or aspirant political leaders are casting around for
popular causes with which to identify themselves. A swift move and a persuasive
presentation may enable children to advance rapidly up the domestic
policy agenda. In Brazil, this strategy was enormously successful. Unicef's
reputation in the country has been greatly enhanced by its championship of
the child as the ultimate target of social policy, an idea which ever since the
mid-1980s has struck a responsive public chord. Its political mileage owes
much to the way in which the children's cause is seen as untainted and
incorrupt; in Brazil, children have been powerful politically simply because
they are above the political divide and disassociated from the type of adversarial
politics synonymous with intrigue, scandal and sleaze.
In September 1986, a National Committee on the Child and the Constitution
was created by interministerial decree60. Its purpose was to invite submissions
on how problems facing children could best be tackled in the new
constitution. Apart from six ministries, including those of Education and
Health, a number of important non-governmental bodies were represented,
including the National Front for the Defence of Children's Rights, the Paediatrics
Association and the National Street Children's Movement. The Committee
campaigned intensively to gather a wide spectrum of opinion and to make
their concerns politically important to members of the Constituent Assembly.
Unicef worked with the Committee in a number of ways, providing a secretariat
and technical assistance, recruiting advertising and publicity support
worth $1.8 million and helping widen the net of groups and organizations
involved. National meetings took place, as well as public debates, mass gatherings
of children in front of the National Congress and in major cities, public
hearings, the distribution of pamphlets, and meetings with individual members
of the Constituent Assembly.
Discussions held in schools all over Brazil and meetings with local and state
chapters of national NGOs and the voluntary 'commissions' produced the
CITY STREETS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS 147
substance of two constitutional amendments. These were presented to the
Constituent Assembly accompanied by a petition signed by 1.4 million Brazilian
children and adolescents, which had itself been endorsed by a petition
signed by some 200,000 registered voters. These texts became the constitutional
chapter on children's rights. A full year before the Convention on the
Rights of the Child was passed by the UN, the principles it would establish
formed the basis of Article 227 in the new Brazilian Constitution. Inspired by
this success, the movement for children's rights launched another even more
far-reaching effort: the drafting of new legislation that would replace the
existing Minor's Code with something consistent with the new Constitution,
abolishing the old corrective and anti-childhood national child 'welfare' policy.
After a year of intensive lobbying and debate, during which considerable
opposition was mounted and a number of revisions were introduced, the
National Congress adopted the Act and it was signed into law by President
Fernando Collor on Children's Day, 12 October 1990.
During this whole experience of collusion between the democratization
process and the child rights movement, Unicef's office in Brazil was charting
an entirely new—quite sensitive and complex—role for the organization. In a
real sense, Unicef Brazil was obliged to pre-empt the evolution of organizational
policy to suit the era of rights-dominated development thinking, the era
of the post-cold war. This was a country in which Unicef programmatic
resources had always been minuscule in proportion to the scale of governmental
services and inputs, and it was a country, therefore, in which Unicef had
already had to carve a pioneering role vis-a-vis policy advocacy and development.
Now it had pioneered another sort of engagement: advocacy for, and
engagement in, the development of reforming legislation on behalf of the
child. The legal and institutional context within which policies and programmes
for children operated was no longer to be seen as beyond Unicef's
scope. It had to be included in the analysis of children's and women's situation,
and it had to be addressed even if this meant steering a course that brushed up
against the political process and invited intrusion on the actions of politicians
and even of political parties.
Through building partnerships with government and NGOs and across the
whole range of civil society, Unicef in Brazil had begun to indicate a new
programmatic framework and set a new advocacy trend. Where Unicef Brazil
had led, other Unicef country programmes were—in time—bound to follow.
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