The CLARISSA programme is co-developing, with stakeholders, innovative and context-appropriate ways to increase options for children to avoid engagement in hazardous, exploitative labour in Bangladesh and Nepal. It is designed to generate innovation from the ground, which can sustainably improve the lives of children and their families.
CLARISSA’s focus is on surfacing key drivers of the worst forms of child labour and developing interventions to counteract them (preventing push factors at community, family and individual level and pull factors from unethical business).
The primary beneficiaries are children in the worst forms of child labour and those who are vulnerable to being drawn into it. The families of these children will benefit from greater resilience to shocks, better options for their children’s safe and healthy future and less intra-family stress and conflict. Businesses will benefit from practical solutions to child-labour free supply chains. Policymakers, NGOs, and researchers will benefit from a knowledge of what works.
Action Research for innovation
We will generate activities and interventions through a large scale Action Research process. Interventions will range from small scale solutions to local problems, behaviour change initiatives, and large scale pilots. Action Research is a programming modality which combines evidence gathering and learning from action. It is designed to enable diverse groups to meet over a period of time to consider evidence and generate theories of change about interventions; plan and programme innovative solutions; test the solutions in real-time, and then evaluate them.
In this way, Action Research groups act as engines of new innovation. These cycles of action and reflection continue until a robust model of action is developed, trialled and can be scaled. We will link multiple and parallel action research groups to form a sophisticated architecture for adaptive learning and management (systemic action research) and will ensure that children are central to this process.
Our aim is to co-develop, with children and families, innovative and context-appropriate ways to increase options for children to avoid engagement in hazardous exploitative labour with the impact of decreasing the numbers of children engaging in the worst forms of child labour, modern slavery and risky migration and improving child well-being.
Thematic and geographical focus
In Nepal, CLARISSA’s focus is the adult entertainment sector in several neighbourhoods in the Kathmandu valley, and in Bangladesh the leather supply chain in the Hazaribagh and Hemaytpur neighbourhoods in Dhaka. Central to the programme design are 17 participatory processes in each country: 15 participatory action research (PAR) groups, a children’s’ research group and a children’s advocacy group. In addition, in Bangladesh, an innovative social protection intervention will test universal and unconditional provision of cash together with family-oriented case work and community development facilitation in one slum neighbourhood in Hazaribagh, Dhaka reaching 1,800 households.
CLARISSA is being implemented by in-country teams of Country Coordinators, participatory facilitators, documenters, MEL specialists, safeguarding leads, researchers, and community facilitators (with support from international members of the consortium partners).
Partners
The programme is led by IDS and is being implemented by a consortium which also includes: Terre des hommes; ChildHope and Consortium for Street Children.
