Projects and Research

• Research projects
• Project countries

The central objective of this three-year project is to strengthen the interface between theory and practice by informing and interacting with policy makers, professionals, children and youth workers on the new and emerging ideas and debates on childhood and youth and suggesting pointers for policy formulation and practice. 'Newly Emerging Needs' or NENs is a label that is used to describe a loosely connected group of new challenges, problems and opportunities confronting children. The specific objectives are to:

1. Explore the key new and emerging needs and challenges affecting children and their families;

2. Identify the factors which constrain the capacity of researchers, policy-makers, field practitioners, communities and young people themselves to identify, anticipate and cope with them;

3. Explore the implications of these developments for practice in the field through fieldwork in selected countries;

4. Synthesise this information in a state-of-the-art publication that will act as a guide to new and emerging ideas and debates on childhood and youth in the various scientific disciplines and international policy discourse, as well as new ideas emerging from practitioners in the field;

and 5. Disseminate the information through a series of international workshops involving donors, researchers, policy makers and practitioners.

Teachers in different countries will be asked to fill in questionnaires about children that do not give reason to concern about their psycho-social functioning and those that do. Data will be collected in South Africa, The Netherlands, India, Bulgaria, Guatamala, Sierre Leone and Japan. The study will run from 2007-2010.