Global Advocacy and Lobbying

Influencing politics and the economy: alliances, lobbying, and advocacy work

To ensure that child rights are realised worldwide and protected in the long run, we must also impact economic, social, and political conditions. For instance, fair trading conditions have to be established to reduce poverty and governments have to provide sufficient financial resources for education and guarantee basic social services.

To achieve this goal, our local partner organisations in our programme countries pursue lobbying and advocacy work targeted at politicians, government agencies, and the private sector. We fight for the rights of children and help to give children a voice for instance by supporting youth alliances. Kindernothilfe in Germany pursues the same strategy. Based on campaigns and alliances, we urge German and international politicians to campaign for the interests of children and youth in developing countries. In concrete terms, this means that – through our dialogue with politicians, high-profile campaigns, and public relations work – we influence political concepts and legislation as well as the scope of financial resources for development policy projects.

A milestone of our lobbying and advocacy work was the introduction of a right of petition for children. This right allows girls and boys, whose rights have been violated, to file a complaint with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, provided that all domestic legal avenues of recourse have been exhausted. When it comes to grave and systematic violations of children's rights, the Committee can initiate direct investigations in a country. In the late 1990s, Barbara Dünnweller from Kindernothilfe proposed that children should have an individual right of petition, but it was only after years of determined work in conjunction with various NGOs and supporting governments that the relevant additional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force in 2014.