Promoting Children's Rights Across India
The India country programme is part of our global mission to realize the rights of children. Objectives we support will therefore be in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We promote the application of the principles of non-discrimination, best interest of the child, survival and development as well as child participation in designing projects.
We work with local partner organisations and support the development of project designs towards holistic child rights programming throughout the project cycle. Partners are free to propose any approach they want to follow. We promote following the self-help approach as a qualified and suitable approach in pursuit of community development as well as many objectives accompanied by lists of possible initiatives, drawn from internationally established standards, stated in the Country Strategy Paper.
Partners remain free to propose their own approach but are encouraged to engage with these standards in designing their projects. Where possible we seek projects to coordinate and integrate with others to tackle child rights violations from a variety of angles and to ensure a holistic approach to the issues we want to address. Wherever possible we would like to facilitate our partners to be part of strategic conversations and or policy discussions at national and state capitals, to be able to work with the government towards systemic change to ensure sustainable development.
Our Focus of Work
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We aim to maintain and develop our core topic of education as a key component of our country programme. We therefore seek and support:
- Initiatives to make education services more available to marginalised children
- Initiatives to make education services more accessible to marginalised children
- Initiatives to improve the acceptability of education services to children and local communities
- Initiatives to make education services more adaptable to children and their communities.
- Initiatives in support of community engagement with education systems
- Initiatives supporting the alignment of education services with the aims of education as stated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These include the support of developing respect for the natural environment as well as promoting understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin
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We aim to maintain and develop our core topic of child protection as a key component of our country programme. We therefore seek and support:
- Initiatives to ensure the implementation and enforcement of laws to prevent violent behaviours, reduce excessive alcohol use, and limit youth access to firearms and other weapons
- Initiatives to strengthen norms and values that support non-violent, respectful, nurturing, positive and gender equitable relationships for all children and adolescents
- Initiatives to create and sustain safe streets and other environments where children and youth gather and spend time
- Initiatives to reduce harsh parenting practices and create positive parent-child relationships
- Initiatives to improve families' economic security and stability, reduce child maltreatment and intimate partner violence
- Initiatives to improve access to good-quality health, social welfare and criminal justice support services for all children who need them - including for reporting violence - to reduce the long-term impact of violence
- Initiatives to increase children's access to more effective, gender-equitable education and social-emotional learning and life-skills training, and ensure that schools environments are safe and enabling
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We aim to maintain and develop our core topic of economic exploitation as a key component of our country programme. We therefore seek and support:
- Initiatives to make education, health and other essential services available, accessible, adaptable and acceptable to working children
- Initiatives to improve families' economic security and stability, reducing the need for children to work
- Initiatives to empower children to improve their working conditions
- Initiatives to ensure that laws concerning working children are implemented and enforced in the best interest of the children
- Initiatives to raise the awareness of the dangers of child labour
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We aim to develop our country programme to include projects in response to climate change. We therefore seek and support:
- Initiatives that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions
- Initiatives which support local communities in adapting to the effects of climate change
- Initiatives in support of natural carbon sinks / REDD+
- Initiatives in support of biodiversity
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We aim to develop our country programme to include projects in response to flight and migration. We therefore seek and support:
- Initiatives to protect trafficked children, displaced children, child refugees and migrants, particularly unaccompanied children, from exploitation and violence
- Initiatives to end the detention of children seeking refugee status or migrating
- Initiatives to keep families together as the best way to protect children and give children legal status
- Initiatives to provide access of refugee and migrant children to education, health and other quality services
- Initiatives to address the underlying causes of trafficking and large scale movements of refugees and migrants
- Initiatives to combat xenophobia, discrimination and marginalization in areas of transit and destination
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We aim to develop our country programme to include projects and project components in preparedness and response to disasters. We therefore seek and support:
- Initiatives in preparation for disasters seeking to:
- link marginalised groups to state and other disaster management structures.
- make disaster management structures and policies responsive to children's views.
- make partners' projects more resilient to extreme weather events.
- Initiatives in response to disasters seeking to:
- ensure child protection in disaster situations.
- ensure education services in disaster situations.
- link marginalised groups to state and other relief efforts.
- Initiatives in preparation for disasters seeking to:
Target Groups
We place a general focus on children living in poverty, especially if they suffer from discrimination based on caste or gender or the other aspects described in our root cause analysis above.
We place an additional focus on children who are victims or at risk of becoming victims of specific child rights violations. These include working children, children on the move, trafficked children and children forced into marriage.
Facts and Figures
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The India work comprises of 55 projects run by 37 local NGOs spread across 12 States in India – Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
Every year we reach out to around 200,000 children directly through our programme which mainly focuses on community-based development work on child rights using child participation and self-help approach involving mothers and women.
Registered as a liaison office, the team in India is 10 people in total – headed by the Country Manager it has 6 people managing the programme, 3 people managing the finance and administration.
Impressions from our Projects
Contact
Kindernothilfe India
N 57, 1st Floor, Greater Kailash - I, New Delhi 110048
Contact: india@kindernothilfe.com










