Advocacy Programs

Background

Local/national Advocacy In both 2023 and 2024, our advocacy interventions were intentional and targeted at specific legislations and policies. These include the review of the 2007 Child Rights Act in order to develop and pass a new Child Rights Act that can more comprehensively address child rights issues such as child justice, FGM and child maintenance that have not been sufficiently addressed by previous or existing legislations. We are in different networks such as the Child Rights Coalition, the Human Rights Defenders Network, the She Leads Consortium and the National Child Welfare Committee that aid our advocacy work. We are also familiar with the context especially being abreast with what is ongoing, what the challenges are and who are the right authorities to meet. We are also very much recognised by the different government ministries and other public institutions that work on policies and legislations and they always invited us to meetings where policies were discussed or drafted.

Above all, we facilitated the participation of children and young people’s groups in policy development processes in order to have their voices heard and to make sure their rights and needs are considered. We supported the young people with finance, logistics and guidance to carry out parallel youth led advocacy work and campaigns.

Regional Advocacy

In addition to our on the ground advocacy work, we also did advocacy at regional and international levels targeting the appropriate decision-making bodies. Our international and regional advocacy was geared towards updating treaty bodies about the status of Sierra Leone government’s implementation of child rights treaties including general human rights treaties that concern children in Sierra Leone that they have ratified. This would enable the treaty bodies engage government and push them to do more. At regional level, the bodies that we targeted include the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. We attended their open sessions in Maseru; Lesotho and they also visited Sierra Leone in August 2023 to follow up on the Sierra Leone government’s implementation of their Concluding Observations and Recommendations stemming from the previous State party report that Sierra Leone submitted on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. As CSOs we prepared the ground for the Committee and we had a session with them to update them. The Executive Director of DCI-SL presented the CSO update on the status of government’s implementation of their concluding observations to the Committee. In 2023, we also mobilized CSOs and coordinated the development of CSO report on the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa dubbed as the Maputo Protocol. We submitted the report to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights. We also supported girls and young women of the West Africa Youths Council to participate in several ECOWAS meetings including the meeting to draft the ECOWAS Youth Policy that took place in Ghana. Under our She Leads project, we supported several girls to participate in regional meetings of regional bodies, Feminist movements and CSO networks in order to get them involved in regional debates on girls and women’s rights as well as gender equality. We supported the Mano River Youths Council.

International Advocacy

The foundation for international advocacy is to push for implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). This includes pushing for and contributing towards the development of complementary instruments such as general comments that enhance implementation of the UNCRC. The aim is that the universal rights of children established by the UNCRC are implemented at state level. In June 2024, the Institute for Inspiring Children’s Futures, University of Strathclyde collaborated with DCI International Secretariat and DCI-SL to organize side events during the High-Level Political Forum meeting of the UN in New York. We also facilitated participation of two young people from Sierra Leone who joined other young people in participating in an intergenerational dialogue geared towards consulting adults and young people on the proposed General Comments No. 27 of the UNCRC Committee on “Children’s Rights to Access Justice and Remedies”. The outcome of this consultation including the powerful views of young people was submitted to the secretariat of the UNCRC Committee in Geneva as input towards the General Comments No. 27 that was under construction. DCI-SL also collaborated with the Child Rights Coalition to draft the UNCRC civil society Alternative reports and also the child centered UPR r4th cycle report.