Past Cooperation and Lessons Learned

Past Cooperation and Lessons Learned

18. 
    In the process of the Mid-Term Review as well as the End-Cycle Review, the achievements of the 2003-2007 Multi-Country Programme Cycle have been commended by UNICEF’s multiple partners. This positive feedback was also confirmed by countries’ contributions to the Executive Board meeting of June 2007 approving the 2008-2011 Multi-Country Programme Document.
    
19. 
    One of the key joint results, achieved by UNICEF in cooperation with Governments and development partners include the development of four draft model family law Bills for the OECS region in collaboration with the OECS Supreme Court, CIDA, UNIFEM, UNECLAC, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the NCH. This first-time ever adoption of the model bills will facilitate the alignment of national laws with international standards.
    
20. 
    Through CARICOM, the Country Programme has contributed to the development of policies in the area of Early Childhood Development which are now being adapted at the national level and are ready to be translated into improved standards.
    
21. 
    By means of continuous UNICEF-driven advocacy and technical support for life-skills and Health and Family Life Education (HFLE), four countries have approved National Policies placing lifeskills based HFLE as part of the core curriculum and three other countries have draft policies awaiting formal adoption.
    
22. 
    Complementing this, a basic five-day HFLE training programme was developed and is being used for in-service training of teachers. In the Eastern Caribbean, the programme is being implemented in seven countries amongst 9-14 year olds, whilst the programme is extended to other age groups in some countries. This provides the foundations for the next phase of HFLE initiatives to focus on quality delivery, to extend delivery throughout the life-cycle, to place it on a whole-school footing and to incorporate initiatives in youth participation.
    
23. 
    The knowledge base on children has been enhanced through vulnerability studies in three OECS countries, a report on the World Fit for Children in the Caribbean, and studies on the scope and impact of violence amongst children and young people in Barbados and Dominica. A comprehensive Situation Analysis was commissioned to support CPD development. The vulnerability study highlighted food insecurity amongst children and has prompted new policy formulations and plans of action.
    
24. 
    The historically poor reach of children’s data and MDG monitoring in the Eastern Caribbean has taken a dramatic turn with DevInfo being adopted and championed by the CARICOM Secretariat, and an independent national platform being established in St. Lucia. DevInfo is the formal contribution of UNICEF to the Caribbean-wide SPARC project as the data management platform of preference. In 2007 the UNICEF Barbados and Eastern Caribbean Office further strengthened its knowledge management through the development of a social policy mapping tool, baseline development and other techniques as well as the publication of a number of monitoring and review documents. All these instruments mounted on a new intranet-based knowledge management platform, called MEPA (Monitoring, Evaluation, Planning and Advocacy) platform.
    
25. 
    In Early Childhood Development, vulnerable children have been reached through the piloting of the Roving Caregivers Programme in Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines in collaboration with the Caribbean Child Support Initiative and the national implementing articles. In the area of education, other model initiatives which have been supported are ‘second-chance’ education programmes for teen-mothers in Dominica, Grenada and St. Kitts and Nevis. These are now documented and being used for advocacy with policy-makers in the other countries of the region.
    
26. 
    In the area of Child Protection, UNICEF is poised to take a major initiative in the elimination of persistent and wide-spread corporal punishment in schools and families, having built a broad coalition with Ministries of Education and Teacher Unions. Similarly, in partnership with the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court, OECS and bilateral agencies, UNICEF was able to reopen dialogue for multi-agency cooperation in responding to the challenges of the juvenile justice system, setting the foundations for new programme initiatives based on multi-professional action, service integration and modernising approaches to the non-custodial treatment of young people in conflict with the law.
    
27. 
    The UNICEF response to Hurricane Ivan in Grenada in 2004, was widely recognized for its success at reaching 35,000 children with education and psycho-social interventions, UNICEF has supported other capacity-building exercises on disaster risk reduction and children in emergencies including convening a Sub-Regional Children in Emergencies meeting in Grenada (June 2006) based on which a plan of action has been developed.
    

28. 
    UNICEF has built the foundations for a middle-income country and SIDS-specific approach to the urgent issues of child protection and the greater recognition of children’s and women’s rights. The combination of success at promoting overarching legislative and regulatory frameworks at the national and sub-regional level with success at promoting direct forms of support and professional action such as the HFLE curriculum and roving caregivers have fed into the design of this new programme of cooperation. The Social Policy element has been designed to create the political, financial, legislative and institutional opportunities within which fundamental changes in organisation and practice (such as service integration and multi-sector cooperation) will produce a more powerful engine for results generation. The key learning has been the need to identify organisational ‘units of change’ – focal points for innovation appropriate to the sector in which we are seeking results.
    
29. 
    While the current multi-country programme succeeded in supporting the formulation of policies in various areas, actual implementation of those policies has varied across the sectors, sometimes hampered by lack of implementation capacity in social systems and the embedded nature of resistance to implementing children’s rights. Policies formulated within CARICOM in the area of Early Childhood Development have shown some success at influencing national priorities, budget allocations and standard setting at national levels – sufficient to create a base for concerted advocacy and targeted development. As a result most of the countries are now striving to achieve universal access to Early Childhood Education. Key factors contributing to this were evidence based policy formulations showing the clear benefits of investment into the early years of childhood, effective partnerships at regional, national and local level, South – South cooperation and the existence of proven and locally acceptable models ready to be brought to scale. Some of the constraints for other policies were lack of routinely collected data, insufficient use and generation of regional knowledge (both being addressed with developments in data management and baseline initiatives), insufficient communication of the policies to the public and absence of participatory monitoring systems that would ensure broad based accountability for achievement of agreed upon results. Systemic insufficient political will, at times characteristic of middle-income countries, has limited some programmatic aspirations of UNICEF and its counterparts.
    
30. 
    While UNICEF has been involved in the formulation of sectoral policies, its input has been limited with respect to the analysis of the impact on children of high debt ratios, national development plans, including Poverty Reduction Strategies, and regional trade agreements. UNICEF’s active engagement with these processes can result in more child and gender-focused data collection and analysis. For example, a UNICEF supported vulnerability study in three Eastern Caribbean countries, St. Lucia, Barbados and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, highlighted formerly unknown areas of child vulnerability such as food insecurity amongst children, ranging from 13 % in Barbados to 46% in Grenada.
    
31. 
    Despite the complexity and sensitivity of the issues around HFLE, the programme has been widely accepted, and used in 7 out of the 10 countries. This is largely because of the strong regional and national commitment and ownership, facilitated by a participatory planning and implementation involving the major stakeholders, duty bearers and right holders. This lesson will be applied to HFLE’s roll-out across all countries in the coming years and to other activities.
    

4. Proposed Programme

32. 
    The overall goal of the Multi-Country programme is to contribute to the realization of children’s rights by fostering an enabling and protective environment, reducing children’s vulnerability to social risks and enhancing their participation. The programme contributes to several areas: (a) social policies and investment reflecting the rights and priorities of children regarding their development, protection and participation, (b) the protection of children against abuse and violence; (c) the reduction of HIV among children, (d) early childhood development.
    
33. 
    The programme will contribute to the following key results by 2011: (a) Key child-friendly and gender-sensitive legislation, policies and budgets are based on evidence and formulated in accordance with international human rights instruments and are monitored through child-sensitive strategic data and information systems (b) Enhanced protective environment for children in families, communities, schools and institutions reducing their exposure to all forms of violence, abuse and exploitation; (c) Children’s development readiness to start primary school enhanced; (d) At least 90% of school-going children and at least 50% of children of out-of school programmes demonstrate behaviours which reduce risk and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and violence.
    
34. 
    The drive for results will be strengthened through partnerships with institutions and professional practitioners. Synergies will be available through the combination of extending legal and regulatory frameworks for child protection along with strengthening implementation capacity through these partnerships. For example, a key constraint to extending child protection has historically been the difficulty of enacting draft legislation and the low level of enforcement of some legislation and regulation. This programme targets this constraint by (a) using a ‘grounded’ evidence base to render social policy more responsive to the realities and needs of children’s services and child-rights advocates; and (b) by encouraging more effective institutional action by integrating services and enhancing the collaborative base of interventions with civil society and young people.
    
35. 
    This programme is designed as a specific response to the characteristics of Middle-Income status and that of Small Island Development States. Inequities, the deficit in children’s rights and their vulnerabilities are institutionally and culturally embedded in ways that constrain organisational and political response. The challenge for middle-income countries is how to mobilise and reconfigure existing intellectual resources, political sophistication, institutional stability and professional commitment. For this reason, the overarching strategy of this programme is focused on a social policy approach and participation. The SIDS dimension calls for careful targeting of resources across a sub-region where governmental resources are dispersed, there is little municipal infrastructure and there are thinly-spread populations in relatively closed communities – hence, the strategy of engaging in ‘knowledge development partnerships’ (see below).
    
36. 
    Guided by the principle of human rights programming and gender equality in line with the CRC and CEDAW, the following strategies will be used: (a) Rights- and evidence-based approaches to advocacy and leveraging of funds with decision makers and donors for improved social programmes and budgets for children; (b) Public education and behaviour change communication with a special focus on raising awareness of the vulnerabilities of young girls; (c) Capacity building of children, families, communities, institutions and other duty bearers for self-protection and self-determination; (d) Participation of girls, boys and women through civil society organization, schools and open evaluation Forums; (e) South-South cooperation to enhance cross-fertilization of best practices and to share knowledge within and around the Caribbean region, including Central and South America and through a knowledge alliance with the South Pacific SIDS; (f) Partnerships and leveraging of results with Regional and Sub-Regional Organizations.
    
37. 
    The proposed multi-country programme is fully aligned with national and regional policy frameworks, such as those of CARICOM and OECS. As detailed in the matrix, the Multi-Country Programme contributes to the achievement of several of the key strategic priorities formulated in the UNDAF for the Eastern Caribbean and will harmonize its programme cycle by 2012. Each of the programme elements has a collaborative base with at least one other UN agency.
    
38. 
    The Multi-Country Programme will contribute to the priorities identified in the Medium-Term Strategic Plans (MTSP) for 2006-2009, Millennium Development Goals and the Mauritius Plan of Action for SIDS, as well as the recommendations of the UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children. Within the MTSPs, special emphasis will be on Focus Area Five related to policy advocacy and partnerships for children’s rights, but also those Focus Areas covering HIV/AIDS and child protection. Concluding observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and CEDAW are key as rights-based instruments for policy guidance and monitoring and were also taken into consideration. Given that the countries covered are middle-income, UNICEF will focus on strategies for sustainable partnerships for children’s rights, through the strengthening of government and civil society capacity on monitoring and evaluation and evidence-based advocacy for child-focused social policies for children and women.
    
39. 
    With a strong emphasis on youth participation, collaboration with civil society and a renewed emphasis on behaviour-change, there is a special role for Communications as a core programme dimension. While sustaining its commitment to enhancing public and professional understanding of UNICEF’s work and the promotion of children’s rights, an enhanced Communications team will adopt a rights-based approach to communications, focusing on activities such as creating and promoting multi-media approaches to children’s and women’s self expression. Much of this focus will be on the new knowledge development approach. This will play a key role in developing and disseminating an evidence base in all child rights areas and especially on child protection. Through its direct support for participation and collaboration, Communications will more closely integrate with the M&E function (e.g. supporting qualitative monitoring) and with the extended approach to HFLE.
    
40. 
    The Subregional Advisor on Child Protection with responsibility for liaising with the CARICOM Secretariat on various technical child protection related processes dealing with migration, armed violence/organised crime, birth registration, children without adequate parental care and institutional violence, is based in the UNICEF Barbados and Eastern Caribbean Office. The Advisor supports the four English-speaking Caribbean UNICEF country offices and is the focal point on child protection issues for the UNICEF Regional Office based in Panama and the UNICEF Global Child Protection Strategy. She also has responsibility for the follow-up of the global commitments for child protection which includes the UN Violence Against Children (VAC) Study and the Graça Machel Review on Children Affected by Armed Conflict and Universal Access to Birth Registration.
    
41. 
    The UNICEF country programme of cooperation will respond to children’s needs in emergencies and other situations in line with General Assembly Resolution 46/182, which emphasizes that Humanitarian assistance is of cardinal importance for the victims of natural disasters and other emergencies, and that humanitarian assistance will provided in accordance with the principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality.
    

42. 
    The CPD programme component, Social Policy, Monitoring and Evaluation for Children’s Rights, hereinafter called, “the Programme”, comprises four elements which are integrated within a unified approach to child protection based on professional innovation and results-generation. The four elements are Social Policy, Advocacy and Partnerships for Children; Child Protection; HIV Prevention and Lifeskills; and Early Childhood Development. Each element has a focus on all levels of social and political action – State policy and legislation, institutional and professional development, and civil society participation. The Programme will support the respective governments and institutions in tackling severe and urgent issues in child protection and social exclusion by promoting better access to affordable and quality social and educational services, an intensive focus on capacity development and strengthening protective environments for the fulfilment of children’s rights. This will be achieved by advocating and supporting regional and national evidence-based policy oriented to children’s rights. This integrated change strategy focuses on strengthening the institutional base and affirms UNICEF’s role as ‘knowledge leader’ in middle income countries.
    
43. 
    The knowledge development partnerships will be the key instruments to achieve innovation and foster integrated and collaborative approaches to results-generation, tackle institutional weaknesses by introducing organisational change and developments in professional practice, and facilitate participatory monitoring and evaluation approaches with young people feeding into advocacy for evidence-based social policy. The combination of social policy and M&E derives from a view of social policy as being shaped by networks covering diverse levels of action including the political, but also including professional practice and organisational development, giving rise to the need for a ‘grounded’ evidence base.
    
44. 
    ELEMENT ONE: Social Policy, Advocacy and Partnerships for Children: This element will serve to integrate the other three by embracing them within a systemic approach to evidence-based social policy. Through partnerships with regional organizations, IFIs, governments, law-makers, other UN agencies, the media, universities, civil society and the private sector, child-focused social policy dialogue will be supported. In collaboration with partners in social institutions and with professional practitioner groups UNICEF will contribute to the empowerment of children and adolescents by encouraging their participation in policy making, the access and use of data, increasing their awareness on their needs and rights, as well as promoting youth networks and sports for development initiatives. As the middle income countries are highly vulnerable to natural disasters, the support of effective emergency preparedness capacity is a key cross-cutting determinant of pro-active social policy and in line with UNICEF’s Core Corporate Commitment for children.
    
45. 
    Integration with the other three elements will take place across four dimensions of programme intervention. They include understanding and planning initiatives, normative and legal interventions, financing initiatives and strengthening implementation capacities of social service interventions.
    

46. 
    In order to leverage results through regional and national partnerships, timely generation, analysis and dissemination of high-quality, child-focused disaggregated data will be undertaken. This will strengthen the knowledge function through improved understanding of social disparities and improve the articulation of the claims of rights holders. These efforts will enable child-friendly, strategic, national and sub-regional evidence-based policy advocacy, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. They will in particular contribute to the progressive building of political will, commitment and leadership for children’s rights realization. UNICEF Barbados and Eastern Caribbean Office will continue its sectoral efforts on promoting and providing technical assistance for the more comprehensive implementation of child protection policies, the investment in early childhood development, the promotion of youth and the fight against HIV/AIDS. In parallel, UNICEF will mainstream child rights issues in major poverty planning initiatives such as PRSPs, poverty assessments and trade agreements. In collaboration with the OECS and the SPARC project, a capacity building programme will strengthen capacity on social policy and child poverty studies and participatory youth forums will give more insight for adequate policy response. In collaboration with the Caricom Secretariat, Dev Info will be further promoted as a tool for the monitoring of key social data and policy analysis support across the sub-region.
    

47. 
    The Social Policy Element will consolidate and promote the enforcement of a protective and enabling legal environment for all children, adolescents and women at the national and sub-regional level. A view of social policy as developed, not just in boardrooms, but also in practitioner and institutional settings will allow for a programme of participation with young people and civil society both in the shaping of policy and in scrutinising the enforcement of existing laws and accountability obligations. UNICEF will continue the monitoring and support of the CRC committees in order to ensure better coherence between CRC and national legislation. Among the priority areas for further assessment are birth registration and child disability.
    

48. 
    During the 2008-2011 period, different initiatives such as “child” and “gender” budgeting will be supported for increased knowledge on the financial and social equitability of budget allocations, social programmes or other financial interventions. Article 4 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child notes the obligation of States to implement rights to the maximum extent of their available resource. This implies the need for analysis of public budgets and their impact on children’s rights. Child budgeting will also be subject to child and youth participation through the promotion of budget literacy.
    

49. 
    The analysis of the mapping of social policy for children in the Eastern Caribbean has revealed major challenges in the delivery of efficient and quality social interventions. Actions will be undertaken for the qualitative and effective implementation of equitable social planning by documenting, modelling, disseminating and encouraging good practices and lessons learnt dealing with the delivery of social interventions.
    
50. 
    Key in this documenting will be the outcomes of the knowledge development partnerships approach. During the 2008-2011 period, through partnerships with regional organizations, IFIs, governments, law-makers, other UN agencies, the media, universities, civil society and the private sector, child-focused social policy dialogue will be supported and results will be leveraged. To this extent, best practices in dealing with child promotion will be documented and disseminated as “implementation models” in order to improve experience sharing and encourage results-oriented implementation of social policy programmes.
    
51. 
    Not only the generation and dissemination, but also the effective use of data for advocacy and policy making, will be central. National and subregional institutional monitoring of key socio-economic indicators will be strengthened through the dissemination of DevInfo, as a data dissemination tool not only in reach (number of countries) but also in depth (quality and child-relevance of indicators). The participation of children and youth in acceding to social indicators on their met and unmet rights through the DevInfo will be explored in at least one country.
    

52. 
    With the aim to measure progress for social policy, advocacy and partnerships, following specific results for this element were brought forward in the CPD 2008-2011:
    

• 
  Result 1. Children, youth and women’s issues are progressively integrated into key policy and public finance budgeting initiatives such as the PRSPs, National Plans of Actions and Poverty Assessments - in at least four countries from the Eastern Caribbean Countries and at the sub-regional level.
  
• 
  Result 2. New sub-regional and national policy and legislative initiatives dealing with Early Childhood Development, Child Protection (including sexual abuse, justice for children), HIV prevention and life-skills are enforced.
  
• 
  Result 3. Disaggregated children’s and women’s data available and integrated into monitoring and evaluation systems at the sub-regional level and in at least four countries from the Eastern Caribbean countries.
  
• 
  Result 4. Development, implementation, evaluation and promotion of child-centered and community-based models in child protection, youth development and HIV/AIDS and ECD.
  

53. 
    ELEMENT TWO: Child Protection: This programme element focuses on prevention of violence, abuse and exploitation of children. It builds on UNICEF’s role as a catalyst for change and seeks to balance responsibilities for facilitating legal reform and modernisation of the family justice system with UNICEF’s key partner, OECS. In this new phase of development, technical assistance will support the completion of model bills which seek (a) to secure the best interests of children by regulating adult parent relationships, not only in matters like custody, support, and access, but also in domestic violence, spousal maintenance, property distribution and divorce; (b) to eradicate gender-based inequality; and (c) to strengthen legal backing for children’s protection both in the content of the law as well as in promoting the consistency of children’s rights as recognised by different courts and in diverse court procedures.
    
54. 
    Technical assistance will also be provided for the adaptation and enactment of these laws in selected countries, to further extend harmonisation of family law in the OECS having regard to the shared socio-economic and cultural conditions and the shared judicial structure. In order to strengthen the implementation of new legislation and to encourage families and children to demand their rights within it, this element will be linked to a new comprehensive, rights-based communications strategy. This will deepen and broaden public awareness of how the provisions of the new laws create an inclusive and protective environment.
    
55. 
    The programmatic commitment to a ‘knowledge development partnerships’ strategy will be met in this element through a focus on service integration and, in particular, inter-agency action. A small number of partnerships with cross-professional groups will allow for the identification of at least two knowledge development partnerships for Child Protection. Their role will be to model forms of service integration and/or cross-professional action and to host and disseminate cross-professional/child-centred approaches to professional development in order to enhance capacity for meeting key results. These initiatives will include (a) inter-professional training on children’s rights under the law, focusing on responsibilities emanating from new family legislation which are to be shared by multi-agency groups; (b) the upgrade of professional practices and organization into a rights-responsive mode for social service interventions in collaboration with the police, judiciary, schools and social work professionals. Child abuse prevention, especially child sexual abuse, reporting and management protocols will be developed and implemented through this service integration and in response to evidence generated through baseline studies of prevalence and attitudes. New strategies or conflict resolution and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders will be tested through a restorative justice approach and diversion strategies that lift young people out of the traditional criminal justice system. The aim is to minimise the use of custodial approaches to create space and resource for holistic programming for young people who run into trouble with the law. A cost-benefit analysis and a professional knowledge analysis on such service integration will create an evidence base for its effectiveness and sustainability. For children already within custodial care, heads of detention centres will be provided technical assistance and evidence to form an action-learning network to align their respective centres with prevailing international standards of practice.
    
56. 
    School is a fundamental element of a protective environment, especially in respect of prevention and building skills for self-protection, but also in fostering debate about gender and the special vulnerabilities of girls. This element will be strengthened through linkage with the whole-school approach to promote positive disciplining, awareness of risk, self-empowerment, peer support with gender awareness, and knowledge of protective instruments. Whole-school strategies will be another opportunity for building multi-agency forums with direct links to communities. Use will also be made of these selected schools to host participatory fora from which faith-based organisations and other key stakeholders will begin to learn from an evidence base about the urgency for the elimination of all forms of physical discipline against young people. This in turn will support the strategy for stimulating the development of social policy responsive to practitioner realities and in collaboration with professional groups. In these settings, the element will focus on conflict resolution, the elimination of corporal punishment across the system, including in schools, and pupil research into barriers to the further implementation of legal protection.
    
57. 
    Against the backdrop of the CARICOM trans-national agenda for children’s protection, partnerships at the action level will be the OECS, Ministries of Legal Affairs, Education and Social Services, professional groups and institutions and children’s rights ‘champions’ in the child protection field. UNICEF collaborates with UNIFEM, especially in relation with programming against child sexual abuse.
    
58. 
    The lessons of the impact of Hurricane Ivan in Grenada showed that more than half of the affected population was under the age of 18, and that only by considering their special needs of protection can we improve their possibility to safety, survival and development. Building on the inter-disciplinary capacity improvement process in 2007, agencies that work in emergencies will be made more aware of the rights and special needs of children in their planning, programmes and daily work, giving special consideration to improved protection of children in emergencies, including their psychosocial needs.
    
59. 
    The Programme will achieve three main results: (a) At least 80% of the children in conflict with the law will be utilizing improved mediation, legal aid and reintegration/diversion services in at least 4 countries (b) All reported cases of sexually abused and exploited girls and boys will be utilizing quality referral services in at least 4 countries and (c) At least 80% of schools will be using positive disciplinary practices and conflict resolution approaches in at least 4 countries.
    

60. 
    ELEMENT THREE: HIV Prevention and Lifeskills: : UNICEF and its partners have supported the successful roll-out of HFLE in seven countries with varying levels of delivery in three countries. This programme element focuses on positive adolescent development through the empowerment of adolescents and the fostering of youth leadership. It builds on extensive experience and a strong contact network around the HFLE curriculum and seeks to further develop its potential to leverage cultural change in schooling and to reach parents and families. The focus of the programme will be to enhance the quality and effectiveness of HFLE interventions. A key strategy will be to place HFLE within a life-cycle strategy and a whole-school approach towards enhanced, evidence-based social policy. HFLE will continue to place emphasis on the development of positive life-styles, and the management of risk through developing the capacities of children and adolescents for independent judgement, self-management and positive decision making. It will also be extended within the life-cycle approach to embrace parental education.
    
61. 
    Knowledge development partnerships will serve as innovation centres of a network of collaborating schools implementing extended HFLE principles and within that network serve as a ‘beacon’ for children’s rights. They will also serve as a focal point for integrating the Child Protection element partnering with youth-led groups wherever possible. Trained HFLE specialists will serve as co-ordinators of programmes for teacher-colleagues to help them to integrate life-skills teaching in a range of curriculum areas, as well as for professional practitioners, parents and community leaders associated with participating schools. The whole-school approach will promote children’s and women’s rights across a schools network; it will model innovatory curriculum and professional development approaches for that network; and it will serve as a focal point for assembling stakeholder and practitioner groups around children’s services including contributing to service integration; and developing participatory strategies for the engagement of young people and families in developing an evidence base on gender, risk and vulnerability to feed into school curriculum, professional training and practice and policy development.
    
62. 
    Participating schools will host inclusive M&E Forums in which young people and their families will move from being passive recipients of HIV, abuse and violence-prevention campaigns, to being active knowledge-generators, mounting critical social enquiries; building and disseminating information; informing social policy development from the ground-up, and serving as ‘critical-friends’ to UNICEF on its role and interventions. These Forums will adopt the programme results framework as their guide. As mentioned above, in at least one country, UNICEF will explore the adaptation of DevInfo for use by teachers and pupils as a resource for such forums. A rights-based communications strategy will support the whole-school/network strategy by providing opportunities and multi-media means by which young people can realise their rights to expression and participation in social policy debates. The aim is to capture the resource of civil society in collaborative working for key results.
    
63. 
    The importance of safe recreational spaces for children and adolescents both in school and beyond will be underscored and the use of sports and culture as the mobilising forces for complementary educational activity will be supported. Building on past experiences, noted exemplary practices in the use of sports and culture for adolescent development will be explored as potential knowledge development partners. Experience in youth participation will be strengthened through exchanges on the SIDS collaboration with the Southern Pacific Island Group. Partnerships at the macro-level will be established with universities, the Pan-Caribbean Partnership Against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP), OECS and CARICOM. UNICEF is currently chairing the UN Country Team on HIV/AIDS and is building research and programming partnerships with PAHO and UNIFEM.
    
64. 
    This programme element will seek to contribute to two programme results:
    

• 
  Children have universal access to quality school-based lifeskills education programmes to reduce risk and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and violence in at least 4 countries from the Eastern Caribbean Countries
  
• 
  Children participate in an increased number of school-based and out-of-school youth-led programmes.
  

65. 
    ELEMENT FOUR: Early Childhood Development: This element will be integrated with an evidence-based social policy approach as with the previous two elements. It will have two key dimensions: (i) an overarching approach to the improvement of the quality of learning and care in early childhood settings through the development of policy, mechanisms for governance and quality assurance, systems for professional development and curricula reform, and (ii) increased access to quality ECD services by vulnerable children, including children from birth to three years of age building foundations for a more effective approach in subsequent years to HFLE and the protection of children.
    
66. 
    Advocacy and technical assistance will strengthen the capacity of countries to develop policies, regulatory frameworks and standards for early childhood care and education services, supported by a sub- regional approach to curriculum reform and professional development. Innovative approaches will be taken to develop alternative ECD services to meet the needs of vulnerable families, including those with children from birth to three years of age, demonstrating cost effectiveness, efficiency and potential for sustainability. The use of ECD centres and/or primary health care clinics will be explored to establish at least two knowledge development partnerships for this element. Most urgently, these partners will develop instruments for the effective identification of vulnerabilities in early childhood and for securing access of children, particularly those in poverty, to ECCE services on a targeted basis. A key instrument for the identification of vulnerability will be the meshing of national systems for the identification of poverty with tried and tested models of community mapping. Mapping will identify a range of modalities for accessing vulnerable children to early childhood care and education services including mechanisms for economic assistance and community supports. These will be disseminated across the sub-region as a model of evidence-based policy development.
    
67. 
    Each country will be encouraged to set a target for the expansion of ECE services to meet the enrolment needs of the pre-primary aged cohort. South-to-South collaboration will promote exchange and dissemination of the rich experiences within this region and with other regions of the world. Key partners will include OECS, Governments particularly Ministries of Education, Health, Social Welfare and Labour, CARICOM and Partners on the CARICOM Regional ECD Working Group including International Development Partners, Regional NGOs and Universities, faith-based organisations and the private sector.
    
68. 
    Knowledge development partners and their associated networks will collaborate in developing approaches for evaluating quality in early childhood care and education services, associated with costing, financing and governance studies.
    
69. 
    This element will seek collaboration with UNESCO as well as the EFA monitoring process and with PAHO on health-related issues. Collaborative potential is to be explored with UNIFEM from the gender perspective and women’s rights and with UNDP on governance and community development.
    
70. 
    The element will contribute to the key result that by 2011 at least 60% of vulnerable children in at least 4 countries have access to quality early childhood development (ECD) services.
    

71. 
    The country programme of cooperation is pursuing an integrated and cross-sectoral approach. The links among programme elements, with the “Social Policy, Advocacy and Partnerships for Children” element as the integrating element, are highlighted in the chart below. As explained in the element’s description above, advanced integration with the other three elements will take place across by means of four social policy action fields of programme intervention. They include understanding and planning initiatives, normative and legal interventions, financing initiatives and strengthening implementation capacities of social service interventions.
    
72. 
    As visualised in the Social Policy, Monitoring and Evaluation Chart, next to the linkages between the social policy approach and the other three elements, the second, third and fourth elements have also strong interrelations. The issue of child protection for example is important for children of all ages, and especially the youngest, as many cases of child abuse have been reported from very young age on. The tracking of potential victims and other vulnerabilities, from an as early age possible, is a strong means for prevention of future incidence.
    
73. 
    The HFLE curriculum covers -to a large extent- child protection issues, as it deals with positive ways of resolving conflict and tackles with various risks and vulnerabilities. For this reason HFLE should be considered as an available and functional instrument to mainstream child rights issues in the schools, and in other youth organisations. HFLE can also be adapted to very young children, as they –in a playful way- have to be prepared to situations of risk, conflict and vulnerability. The different elements can be linked from a life-cycle approach, with HFLE as a driving force, focusing on the independence and the empowerment of young people which will lead to more positive lifestyles and choices. Pulling the life-cycle analysis even further, first outcomes of the whole school approach has learned us that interventions need not only to impact children, put also their direct caring environment such as their parents and their peers.
    
74. 
    The interaction between the different programme elements will gain pace through the catalysing and leveraging role of the knowledge development partners, who will be encouraged to extend their interventions with new initiatives to deal with all children’s rights.
    

Integrating element 1. Social policy, advocacy and partnerships for children	Element 2. Child protection	Element 3. HIV and Youth Development	Element 4. Early Childhood Development
UNICEF will negotiate political will commitment and planning for children’s rights Mainstreaming outputs and activities: - Social Policy capacity building - Social Policy Mapping updates and advocacy - Child poverty studies - Youth forums for feedback on social policy issues - Documenting lessons learned and best practices for political will	Child protection is a priority area of social policy advocacy SP capacity building, mapping and child poverty studies will strengthen understanding of and political will for child protection Youth forums will reflect and monitor CP issues CP knowledge development partnerships will be evaluated, documented and integrated in the overall SP strategy KAP assessments enable public and political awareness of child abuse	Youth leaders and the curriculum review of HFLE will benefit from social policy mapping, capacity building and the child poverty studies outcomes Child and youth poverty needs more policy attention Young people are empowered for participation in policy through capacity building and their voicing in youth forums School students will engage in practical social research to create an evidence base for social policy and advocacy Examples of youth participation in social policy will be documented	National policy frameworks on ECD will be improved, taking into account quality and access to ECD Community mapping on vulnerable young children will generate an evidence base for the shaping of social policy and feed UNICEF advocacy The EFA commitments on ECD will be applied sub-regionally and nationally Social policy capacity building will stress the importance of young children. Case-studies and quality surveys on ECD and vulnerable children increase policy awareness.
Rights-based social policy enables the drafting, enactment and enforcing of CRC coherent national and subregional legislation Mainstreaming output and activities: Advocacy and monitoring for CRC compliance, accountability and reporting	- National acts on Juvenile Justice and mandatory reporting of child abuse are coherent with CRC - Capacity building enables the enforcement and application of international and national law dealing with child protection - Common (OECS) legislative frameworks for child protection promote national legislation	Through HFLE+, young people will be more aware of their rights; Young people will –through youth forums- participate in policy and legislation building activities Stigma and discrimination –as defined by the CRC and CEDAW- will be dealt with in HFLE classes	ECD standards enable a healthier ECD environment and better protection and care for children and their caregivers. Accrediting curricula ensures public accountability
Insight and participation in budgeting and financing processes contributes to the increased investment in children Mainstreaming outputs and activities: Child budgeting initiatives and training	Policy commitment for child protection should be accompanied by financial investment in sustainable social services for vulnerable children. The longer term costs of child abuse, violence, children in conflict with the law for society is a strong argument for more investment in children. Cost-benefit analysis on possibilities for service integration for juvenile justice	Alternative and efficient ways of financing and costing of “sports for development” and “youth development” will be explored. Youth forums will be supported to analyse public budgets and give feedback to policy makers.	Social policy capacity building and child budgeting will give insights in the level of commitment for ECD. Costing and financing studies will inform governments about alternatives to invest in ECD Knowledge development partnerships to reach vulnerable children will inform on sustainable and cost-effective ways to reach vulnerable children.
The strengthening of the implementation and monitoring capacity leads to more effective accountability towards social policy commitments. Mainstreaming outputs and activities: Dissemination of DevInfo Knowledge development partnership approach	In-service training programmes will ensure the application of CP policies and laws. Community based and multi-agency action (e.g. restorative justice approaches) is a resource for child protection and is also a key development of social policies at institutional level. Knowledge Development Partnerships (including the “whole school approach”) provide an appropriate ‘unit of change’ for the development of social policy; Child protection data will be generated and integrated in DevInfo databases.	Knowledge Development Partnerships and HFLE teaching/ learning strategies empower young people and their organisation for HIV prevention, positive lifestyles and leadership The delivery and monitoring of HFLE will be strengthened through teacher training and national monitoring mechanisms. Students research –using a.o. DevInfo- will provide evidence for social policy monitoring and evaluation	Knowledge development partnerships enable insight in new institutional mechanisms to reach vulnerable children The implementation and monitoring of ECD standards and accredited curriculum ensures accountability for quality and institutional strengthening More specific indicators on the performance of ECD sector –linked to EFA and DevInfo- will allow monitoring of key social statistics Capacity building and professional development centres improve quality service delivery. Surveys will increase knowledge on the quality of ECD settings.
Cross-cutting issues: Emergency preparedness and response - Gender and HIV/AIDS - Behavioural Change Communication