Projects and Research

Newly Emerging Needs of Children and Youth

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.


Outcomes

Country Studies Case studies were carried out in Indonesia,Bulgaria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Nicaragua which together represented a wide range of cultural, political and social worlds with distinct child and youth policies and practices. Publications

1. Nico van Oudenhoven and Rekha Wazir (2006), "Newly Emerging Needs of Children: An Exploration", Garant, Antwerp, 2006. This book has been translated into Bulgarian and Portuguese and a Russian translation is being negotiated. A summary of the book has been translated into Bulgarian, Slovak and Romanian.

2. Rekha Wazir (2008), “Newly Emerging Needs of Children: Towards Widening the Policy Agenda in South Asia”, Indian Journal of Human Development, Vol. 2, No. 1, January-June.

3. Iordan Iossifov (2008), "Take me seriously! Growing up in a society where the role of traditional mediators diminishes". Paper presented at ICYRNet Conference in Nicosia, Cyrpus, May 2008. Download

Seminars and Workshops Presentations have been made to mixed audiences of academics, students, policy makers and NGO staff at Unicef, New York; in Bucharest, Romania to the Civil Society Development Foundation; in Sofia, Bulgaria to the Free and Democratic Bulgaria Foundation and to the New Bulgaria University; the Central American University in Managua, Nicaragua; to the participants of the regional Child-Rights Research Conference in Kingston, Jamaica; to the participants of the Children and Youth Diploma held at the Institute of Social Studies; and at the conference on Universalizing Social Security in Asia held in New Delhi.


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