Nearly 30 years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children and youth around the world, of all ages and backgrounds, continue to experience abuse, neglect, exploitation and violence. As well as being a direct violation of their rights, this violence can have a deeply harmful impact on children’s long-term well-being and development.

At ChildFund, we are committed to changing this. Guided by our organizational strategy, Destination 2020, we are strengthening our child protection work around the world to ensure that the progress we make for children is not undone by abuse, neglect, exploitation, or violence. This involves systematically targeting — across all our programs — the risk of violence that may disrupt children’s well-being and development, while working with communities and governments to advocate for wider policy and social change. At the same time, we are strengthening our ability to provide high-quality programming that enables children of all ages to grow and thrive.

As an important first step, we are investing in collecting information about the risk of abuse, neglect, exploitation, and violence that children experience across the countries where we work. We are already learning valuable lessons. Child protection mappings, new monitoring and evaluation (M&E) data, and innovative research studies are helping us to better understand the factors that render children vulnerable to violence, as well as those that protect children at different stages of childhood. We are using this knowledge to tailor our programs in response and strengthen our overall child development work while also working to transform ourselves internally so that we set the highest standards for the way that we work with children.