I was very pleased to co-present a webinar yesterday to 19 of Save the Children's staff from their School Health and Nutrition team and to some of their Programme Managers. My presentation focused on Children's Participation in Health Education and Health Promotion and this was followed up by two excellent case studies from Mali and from Pakistan. It was thrilling to be show how an approach I co-created at The Child-to-Child Trust many years ago is now supporting the development of an exciting programme reaching thousands of children! I wanted to make the presentation available to this group and to you on this blog and I will be tackling some of the questions that arose from it over the coming weeks.
The presentation covers the following issues:
1. A definition of participation (as a starting point - it is ALWAYS useful to develop your own consensus about what children's participation means among key stakeholders)
2. Distinctions between health education and health promotion. (Children's participation in health combines health promotion activities as part of the process of teaching health education.)
3. Two examples of models that seek to set out levels of participation that are useful to use in a training setting to clarify the level that your project seeks to attain. These models help users understand the shift in power dynamics between adults and children as they undertake participatory projects.
4. Key points that come out of a story of an encounter I had with a child in Columbia that clearly demonstrates why it is beneficial for children to participate in health and development.
5. The modern context in which participation is practiced and promoted notably the Declaration of Primary Health Care at Alma Arta (1978) that includes participation as a key principle...
The people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care.
...and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The internationally agreed framework underpinned by the principles of protection, provision and participation.
6. Extracts from selected documents of key players on the international development stage that set out the importance of children's participation
7. Three frameworks to use to understand and support the implementation of participation at field level.These include an approach based on the 6-step Child to Child approach, an approach called Design for Change and reference to an approach used to achieve Community/school Led Total Sanitation. As with the definition it is more useful to design and develop an approach that works for your project than to try to adopt an approach. Many of the approaches above have elements in common.
8. An example and demonstration of a tool I call, 'The Opportunities Chart' that has been used with groups of children, adults and mixed groups to initiate and/or deepen discussions about health priorities in families and communities and gather ideas about what children can do to contribute to solutions.
9. The presentation concludes with the description of a diagnostic tool I use to help analyse if a project or programme is not working smoothly.
Lastly there is a link to the toolbox on this blog as this has many practitioner resources and references that can be of interest to people working on participation related work.
Enjoy! Click the link here to download the presentation. For full notes on each slide please contact me.
Please send me any comments or questions either in the box below or on email. I woud love to hear from you!
