Child Rights and You - Areas of Work

Areas of Work

The key functions of Development Support (grant making) and Resource Mobilisation (fundraising) along with the other support functions - Communications, Human Resources, Youth and Volunteer action, Finance, Planning and Information Technology, Policy and Research, Documentation, The CRY Shop - all play a critical role in the organisation building efforts.

It works towards restoring basic rights to children, especially from India and works across levels from direct action to advocacy, mobilizing public opinion and policy change. It focuses mainly on the four basic rights of survival, development, protection and participation which were defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The CRC is built on certain "foundation principles" that underpin all other children's rights.

CRY’s approach works through a three-phase engagement: • First, CRY chooses to work in areas where the human development indicators are the worst in the country – seeking out the most marginalised communities and their children. It examines the situation of the children in these communities in a holistic manner, covering the entire gamut of issues that affect them. • CRY then seeks to understand the root causes of the deprivation faced by children in education. In India, the root causes that prevent children from accessing their rights often tend to be: i) gender- or caste-based discrimination in the home, the community or in school, ii) the lack of adequate livelihoods for the adults, forcing them to make their children work as child labourers, or iii) forced displacement that forces families to migrate, and also pushes children to drop out of school. Finally, CRY and its partners mobilize the local community to find long-term solutions to these root causes by making sure that the laws and policies that guarantee their rights are actually implemented. CRY started work on empowering under-privileged children and the communities they belonged to by actively partnering smaller / grassroots-level NGOs working in remote and neglected areas of India. These smaller organisations are trained to mobilise rural and urban communities to access their entitlements through collective action.

The process of building the community-based collectives entail educating and informing the rural poor about their entitlements to education as given by the Government under the relevant Acts and Schemes; and enabling them to demand these entitlements from the local government.