Protagonismo Infantil - Child Advocates

Have you heard? Children are standing up for themselves in Bolivia and getting the word out about child rights! Through our city-wide networks of local projects and churches in Bolivia, Viva is bringing up child leaders who are making a lot of noise about their rights in their own neighbourhoods and communities.

In Bolivia, education and child health are being improved in the interest of national development. But the root problem isn’t being addressed, and Bolivia still has a culture of child neglect. UNICEF says children in Bolivia are often thought of as property, which explains the astronomical level of abuse in schools.

The easy thing to do would be to tell Bolivian adults to respect children, and then hope for the best. But that solution would hardly last generations. Instead, Viva is teaching the children themselves how to bring about change. Through our networks we’re reaching children at more than 130 local projects and 41 local churches, all over the country. This is why working together is so great – we can reach so many more children than just one project working alone.


Viva has six networks in Bolivia. Each network has 12 representatives, a mix of boys and girls between the ages of 10-15, and these ‘Child Ambassadors’ are elected by the children in their projects to represent them to their communities. Once a year the 72 Child Ambassadors come together to plan ahead for the year, coming up with events and campaigns to run in their hometowns. Then they go home and get to work.

For the last three years as part of their Good Treatment campaign more than 5,000 children have spent a week ‘inoculating’ the adults in their cities against treating children badly. They set up stalls in the busy marketplaces and if an adult stops to hear about keeping children safe, and signs their name to agree to do all they can to protect children, then they’re rewarded with a certificate and a ‘cure’ - a sweet! Last year more than 28,000 adults were given this ‘medicine’ to help them treat kids right.

Throughout the year the Child Ambassadors plan separate events in their own cities to publicise child rights. Last month in Cochabamba, for example, members of the children’s ‘Directorate’ have taken part in municipal elections, arranged interviews on radio and television to tell about the needs of children, attended a leadership camp, and taken a collection of donated clothing to teenagers living on the streets.

Cities all over Bolivia are seeing their very poorest children educated and given the power to stand up for their own rights. Children are invited from the projects and right off the streets to watch videos and attend events that are designed to teach them what rights they have, and how to protect themselves from abuse. The local projects that make up Viva’s city-wide networks know just what children are most vulnerable and can get the word out to them, so that nobody misses out.

Child Advocacy doesn’t just improve the lives of children now. It’s changing the whole society and forcing adults to respect their children as important human beings with rights and desires of their own. And it’s forming the perspective of Bolivia’s future generation – the one that’s growing up now – so that the children living there years from now will do so in a society that respects and protects them.

Excitingly, giving children the power to protect their own rights has been so successful that our networks in Uganda are adopting the same technique. So watch this space, because a member of our international team has just come back from Kampala and will be on here soon to give the latest news ...


~ Viva, Latin America office