The Global Child Rights Dialogue during COVID-19: multi-country action research

Research project During the COVID-19 pandemic, children’s rights to learn, play and gather have been limited. Regardless, they are in a situation with limited opportunity to express their opinions. The Global Child Rights Dialogue (GCRD) in COVID-19 is an international project that aims to seek children's thoughts and feedback on their rights as articulated under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). How these rights have been affected during the pandemic and how it should be observed and fulfilled.

The project is a multinational collaboration together with Japan, South Korea and Tanzania. We aim to describe the situations of children under the Covid-19 pandemic in each country and provide policy recommendation to improve these situations. The international collaboration will allow us to explore the differences between the different contexts.

Head of project

Hajime Takeuchi Visiting professor

Email

Mazen Baroudi Research fellow

Email

+46 90 786 75 54

Project overview

Project period:

2021-12-01 – 2024-12-31

Participating departments and units at Umeå University

Department of Epidemiology and Global Health

Research area

Public health and health care science

Project description

Description of the project

The aim of the project is to

Examine if/how children's rights are violated under the Covid-19 pandemic by children themselves.
Explore the efforts that the society and the government should take to fulfill the children’s rights.

We will conduct workshops with children 10 to 18 years old to discuss several articles of the UN CRC (Convention on the Rights of the Child). The articles cover rights about children with disability, health and health services, social security, and welfare. In each of the participating country, we will conduct 5 to 10 group discussions with 5 to 6 children each. Each workshop will have at least one facilitator and last maximum 2,5 hours. Children in the workshops will be asked to read the child-friendly versions of the selected articles (two articles per group) and discuss the following issues:

Do children enjoy this right currently?
How could we tell if children were enjoying this right?
How could we monitor this right?
What should governments be doing to ensure that children enjoy this right?

External organisations

Bukkyo University Japan, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences Tanzania, With-commune cooperative South Korea.

External project members:
Malale Tungu, Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences Tanzania
Kwang Joon Park, Professor, Department of Social Welfare, Bukkyo University, Japan.
Tomoko Tanaka, Professor, Department of Social Welfare, Bukkyo University, Japan.
Masako Nagase, Associate Professor, Department of Social Welfare, Bukkyo University, Japan.
Mitsue Kobayashi, Lecturer, Department of Social Welfare, Bukkyo University, Japan.
Hyeran Chun, PhD, With-commune cooperative, South Korea.

Latest update: 2022-01-27