As a Senior Associate at Child Frontiers, Martha Nelems advises UNICEF, the government of Bhutan, and the Canadian International Development Agency on global children's rights.
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ABOUT THE TALK
The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world and has been ‘a game changer’ in increasing global focus on the rights of girls and boys to survival, development, protection and participation. The CRC has entrenched the notion of the best interests of the child and has helped to shift our notion of children as ‘passive recipients’ of our assistance and pity to understanding them as ‘active participants’ in shaping their lives and those of their families and communities. There is now an urgent need in the field of child protection, defined as the prevention of and response to violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect of children, to move away from single thematic programmatic and policy initiatives (for example, working children or sexually exploited children) to ‘a systems approach’. This approach demands that we help governments in the global south build or strengthen their child protection systems. If these systems are to be viable, they must recognize the formal role that governments and civil society groups play in protecting children, as well as the many, informal ways families and communities protect girls and boys from harm. Systems work requires that we negotiate through the tricky waters of balancing international rights standards with contextualized approaches that are sustainable in the cultural context. Throughout the talk, Nelems will give examples from her recent work in Timor-Leste, West and Central Africa and Bhutan.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
MARTHA NELEMS has over fifteen years of experience in promoting children’s rights, with a particular focus on child protection including child protection in emergencies. Based in Los Angeles, one of Nelem’s main interests is helping organizations develop evidence-based child protection policy. She has supported agencies such as Plan International and UNICEF to turn child protection policies into action through mentoring, training and strategic advice. She is passionate about promoting the involvement of children and their families in participatory research, needs assessments and evaluations.
Martha Nelems served as senior policy analyst for children's rights at the Canadian International Development Agency and developed CIDA's child protection action plan, including a 2 million dollar child protection research fund, as well as advising programming branches on implementation. Subsequently, as a senior consultant working independently and with various consulting firms, she led research and evaluation programs, conducted training and mentoring, particularly in the Middle East with Iraqi and Syrian refugee children and their families.
Sponsor(s): UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, International & Comparative Law Program (ICLP) at UCLA School of Law, UCLA Center for World Health