CHI activities in reaching out to young people

CHI aims towards a world where telecommunication allows children and young people to be heard one by one, and through their voices shape the world and realise their rights. It seeks to respond to children and young people in need of care and protection and voice their concerns to policy and decision-makers. The strategic focus followed by CHI is to facilitate more children and young people across the globe to access helplines and subsequently to document their voices, to learn from them to advocate for gaps in services and develop minimum quality standards amongst helplines. CHI works towards this strategic focus through the following activities:

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  Establishing child helplines: CHI is currently working with Barbados, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon Palestine, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan and Zambia to help them establish a helpline for children and young people. Since CHI’s inception in September 2003, Colombia, Egypt, Mongolia, Nigeria, Panama, Serbia/Montenegro, Uganda and Vietnam have launched their helplines. It is targeted to have helplines in 100 countries by the end of 2006.
  
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  Increasing access to existing child helplines: CHI is working with helplines with local coverage to scale up and strengthen their services to reach out to more children. Through a process of twinning between existing and emerging helplines, CHI has collaborated with Panama (twinned with Colombia, Mexico and Peru), Egypt, Mongolia and Vietnam (twinned with India), Kenya (twinned with South Africa) and Uganda (twinned with Zimbabwe) to strengthen these emerging helplines.
  
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  Learning from the voices of young people: CHI has compiled a global directory of all children’s helplines entitled: Connecting to Children. This publication lists the contact information of helplines; analyses the types of calls received and identifies innovative strategies used by helplines to reach out to children and young people. CHI is working towards developing a database of globally received calls and ensuring common documentation parameters of all calls.
  
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  Facilitating sharing of experiences amongst helplines: CHI organises national, regional and international consultations on special themes and activities aimed at strengthening the movement of child helplines thereby reaching out to more children. Exposure study tours have also been organised where Brazil visited Argentina and Italy, Bulgaria visited Slovakia, Philippines visited Pakistan, Thailand, The Czech Republic and Brazil visited Childline UK and NSPCC. A Tsunami workshop was also held in India where Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand participated.
  
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  Initiating a process of implementing principles, standards and practice: To develop quality standards so that helplines reach out more effectively to children and young people.
  
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  Evolving and Strengthening Partnerships: CHI is partnering with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), UNICEF and UNCRC to facilitate the protection of children through child helplines as a strategy. It is also partnering with key donor agencies and national and international networks.