|
ASIA Regional Workshop: Best Practices on the Elimination of Child Labor
Winrock International is scheduled to conduct the Community-Based Innovations to Reduce Child Labor (CIRCLE) Project 2007 Best Practices Asia Regional Workshop. Winrock is in the process of completing its documentation of Best Practices that represent the innovations, achievements and impacts of CIRCLE on reducing child labor around the world. This conference is one of three regional Best Practice workshops that Winrock is sponsoring in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that will bring together CIRCLE partners, key stakeholders, and other NGOs to exchange and share relevant experiences and best practices. The workshop aims to provide the participants with opportunities to share, learn and apply various techniques and ideas for designing effective projects to eliminate child labor. CIRCLE is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor/Office of Child Labor, Forced labor, and Human Trafficking.
The goal of CIRCLE is to document the Best Practices of the organizations and disseminate to the international community. To date, through three competitive proposal rounds, over 100 CIRCLE sub-projects in 23 countries have launched innovative, locally developed, and community-based pilot projects to reduce child labor through education. Over 20,000 children have received direct educational services and been withdrawn or prevented from exploitive child labor through educational alternatives. The CIRCLE project has assisted these efforts through close technical management and NGO capacity building, as well as through networking activities that linked organizations together to exchange experiences, best practices, and lessons learned.
The CIRCLE project and development of the Best Practices has been a highly participatory process itself. We have benefited from the in-kind contributions of a Regional Selection Committee (RSC) and members of ILO-IPEC who also are helping facilitate this workshop as well as the volunteer contributions of over 100 outside peer reviewers, including the NGOs themselves, of the projects for ascertaining the Best Practices to be documented.
These workshops represent the culmination of the effective approaches and Best Practices undertaken by sub-contracted non-governmental (NGO) and community-based organizations from around the world, to provide educational alternatives to exploitive child labor. For this workshop we have developed working modules and training materials for the participants that can accompany the Best Practices document as guidelines for using and training others in the practices and project design. We hope that this meeting will help inform the knowledge base, and be a learning experience and provide the common ground for the continuation of implementing innovative projects that help children and families reach their potential and improve lives.
|
