Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) is hosting a series of online events in July to share some of the exciting highlights from the six year research and innovation programme. It was funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and was one of the largest participatory programmes funded in the development sector.
The programme focused on child labour in the Adult Entertainment Sector in Nepal, and in the Leather sector in Bangladesh. Its core implementation modality was systemic action research.
Some of the elements that make this programme unusual include:
- The core participants of the programme were children working in worst forms of child labour, or small business owners in the informal economy that employ them. CLARISSA worked closely with both as potential changemakers
- It built a deep, systemic understanding of the dynamics of child labour from 800 life stories analysed by working children themselves. This work was enhanced by use of a mix of qualitative and participatory methods including workplace shadowing, micro level neighbourhood mapping, surveys of small informal businesses, recording and tracking a day in the life of more than 40 children.
- Its focus on participatory evidence generating was centred around 25 action research groups whose purpose was to generate innovative solutions. These operated for between a year and 18 months. Over 400 Action Research meetings were held across the 2 countries.
- It invested in an embedded, participatory and theory-based approach to evaluation and learning.
- It employed a participatory adaptive management approach to facilitate the use of learning to respond to emergent opportunities.
These characteristics offer learning for the whole development system about a different way to do development. We offer some insights into this in the following four webinars:
The first webinar Chain Reaction: revisiting child labour launched a new documentary film that shows the reality of Worst Forms of Child Labour in Dhaka and Kathmandu and how the children and business owners built a response. It illustrates how more horizontal and networked forms of change can be catalysed through systemic action research.
Watch now
The second session Hard labour: Understanding children’s experiences of urban child labour and what drives small informal businesses to hire them focussed on the micro level understanding of the dynamics of child labour. Pathways into child labour, what a day in the life of a working child looks like, the businesses they work in, and the neighbourhoods they live in. Key findings will be presented alongside a new website Hard Labour which provides an immersive journey into these stories.
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The third session From learning to action through participatory adaptive management explored the way in which a large programme running across multiple countries with multiple partners was able to build and model a process of participatory adaptive management, fuelled by the programme’s action research modality.
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The final session The praxis of child participation posed as a conversation between theory and practice, the speakers sharing what they had to learn (and unlearn) to work effectively with children. It offered a critical reflection on the praxis of a child-led approach – looking at it’s affordances and challenges — through a conversation between the CLARISSA and REJUVENATE projects.
