Mostafa Sen

Education - Cambodia (East Asia)

Strategy

The Project goal is to promote children’s rights, particularly their rights to participation, in four target provinces of Kampong Thom, Kampong Speu, Battambang and Rattanakiri. The Project objectives to provide children with opportunities to learn, share and practice children’s rights and their experience;  to encourage communities and local authorities to recognize the role of children in the realization of children’s rights and to build their capacity, by involving them in promoting children’s rights, practicing children’s rights, problem solving, and information dissemination.  Children will have the opportunity to develop their own ideas, and put them into action by themselves, and learn to work more effectively through this experience. The criteria for the children selected are children who are the potential and commitment children, a desire to learn and participate and who have not previously had access to such programs and the general children.

There is a strong gender focus to all of the work, thus a balance of involvement will also be sought. The strategies will be practically implemented through conducting training workshops, establishing information sharing networks, develop children's clubs and publishing training manuals.

Implementation:

Mostafa's Action Plan is still related to capacity building of children and it is implemented in 4 different provinces of Cambodia. In every province 5 peer educators have been selected. All in all there are 20 peer educators.

After the selection process capacity building workshops are conducted in Phnom Penh focusing on skills such as Children’s Rights, Proposal Writing, Facilitation Skill, Organizing Workshops and Report Writing.  After the capacity building the children go back to their provinces and train other peer educators by sharing their experiences. The child peer educators then conduct workshops by themselves in 40 different villages. 

The results of this project were shown as the following:

- 780 children in 40 village gained knowledge on UNCRC and domestic violence and were inspired about the important of children’s participation.
- 800 copies of training manual concerning to children’s rights and domestic violence were printed and distributed to the target children.
- A first children club was created in Rattanakiri province.
- 20 child peer educators were improved their knowledge, capacity, ability and experience on Children’s Rights, Domestic Violence, Planning, Report Writing, organizing and facilitation workshop.
- The children voices were raised up in to the report on Situation of Children in Cambodia.
- Some communities, teachers and local authorities recognized the important of children’s participation and their abilities.