Who Protects Children’s Rights? Working Children as Agents in Child Rights Governance

Global child rights and child labour regulation aim to protect children from exploitation and abuse and to empower them to claim their rights. Yet organisations designed to help children, especially working children, often treat them as the passive beneficiaries of protective interventions that may alleviate hardship in the short-term but reinforce disempowerment in the long-term. Evidence from organised working children’s movements in the Global South challenges this assumption. These movements actively implement, adapt, and influence child rights frameworks. This blog article shows how these movements can themselves provide protection and argues that child protection and rights actors should move beyond consultation-based participation toward recognising children as co-producers of protection and governance.

During the latest 6^th Global Conference on Child Labour held in Morocco in February 2026, the otherwise diverse and comprehensive programme revealed one striking absence, namely voices of working children themselves. By contrast, during the 5^th Global Conference on Child Labour organised in 2022 in South Africa, international institutions celebrated children’s participation as a central achievement of the summit. Yet representatives of the African working children’s movement — critical of abolitionist child labour policies — remained largely marginal to official discussions. The sidelining of working children’s perspectives in debates on adequate child labour regulation is not new and reveals a broader contradiction: children and youth are increasingly invited to participate, but rarely recognised as political actors with legitimate claims of their own.

This tension is reflected within practices of international child rights governance. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) frames children, on the one hand, as vulnerable beneficiaries and, on the other, as potential agents with participation rights. In practice, child protection programmes by International Organisations (IOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) often leave little room for recognising children as political actors. As shown by their intervention during the Durban conference, organised movements of working children in Africa, Latin America, and Asia challenge this assumption, claiming their right to political participation and arguing for a better distinction between exploitation and dignified forms of work for children. At the same time, these movements are deeply embedded in child protection ecosystems. As local partners implementing aid programmes or awareness campaigns, they enable these interventions and shape their content and form on the ground. In doing so, they also question the norms on which they are based. This underlines that working children are not only beneficiaries of international child protection but also co-construct global child rights governance.

The Problem: Lack of Participation, Limited Protection

Contemporary child rights governance emerged from Eurocentric understandings of childhood that framed children primarily as innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection. Although Article 12 of the CRC formally introduced participatory rights, global child rights governance largely treats children as passive beneficiaries who require adult representation, rather than recognising them as autonomous political actors. At the same time, international child labour regulation universalises labour-free ideals of childhood through its Conventions C 138 on the minimum working age and C 182 prohibiting the worst forms of child labour for all minors under the age of 18. Critics argue that these standards promote a “school-and-play” model of childhood, largely informed by children’s situation in the Global North and excluding the economic and communal role played by children in many societies.

For working children, this creates a contradiction. They are simultaneously understood as vulnerable victims in need of protection, as deviants from normative childhood expectations and, in many cases, as illegal workers, and finally as rights-holders formally entitled to participation. Movement members have criticized the way international organisations conflate exploitative labour, trafficking, and family work under the label of “child labour”. Rather than distinguishing between exploitation and dignified, age-appropriate work, this approach would stigmatise children’s lived realities and justify policies that seek to eliminate their economic participation entirely.

In protection interventions, underestimating children’s perspectives can lead to even greater power imbalances. Protection programmes often do not fit local realities, underutilise children’s knowledge and capacities, and may unintentionally reinforce paternalistic assumptions. For child protection actors, this creates a “participation-protection dilemma” and a crucial discrepancy between rights-based rhetoric and operational practice. As shown by their participation in Durban, while their presence is in some instances formally recognised, it is often limited to one-off consultations, adult-managed forums, and symbolic inclusion without real influence.

Children as Co-Governors in Child Rights

Efforts to increase participation in child rights governance often overlook how organised movements of working children are already potent child protection actors themselves. Operating at grassroots levels in 28 African and 10 Latin American countries as well as in India, these movements and organisations actively protect children on the ground and cooperate with NGOs, IOs, local communities and state actors. For instance, in grassroots groups of the Senegalese Association des Enfants et Jeunes Travailleurs (AEJT), organised working children collectively learn about rights, support one another, and build shared political identities through everyday practices that transform them from perceived victims into political actors. As organised local actors, they cooperate with NGOs such as Save the Children and Terre des Hommes to identify vulnerable children on the move, organise mobile outreach teams, run safe spaces, and support access to schooling and social services. Because they are deeply embedded in local communities, they conduct awareness campaigns on women’s, ecological or child rights, and help translate child protection programmes to local realities. For example, as partners of the British NGO Tackle, the AEJT conducts sexual and reproductive health interventions. In this cooperation, they take standardised approaches, such as condom distribution and adapt them through open discussion rounds and participatory theatre plays to local norms and concerns. In this way, they help culturally controversial discussions such as women’s rights and reproductive health become more acceptable and effective in their communities. Beyond implementing projects of international NGOs, organised working children engage in local child protection, working closely with parents, religious leaders, neighbourhood chiefs, and other community actors. They often identify cases of abuse or exploitation before state institutions do, mediate problems directly, refer severe cases to governmental protection services and support children’s access to schooling and documents.

They also participate in national policy debates through media campaigns and advocacy in policy consultations. At the regional and international level, they are represented as delegates of the wider African movement, which has held observer status in the African Union’s African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) since 2012. In the ACERWC, they regularly participate and campaign against child marriage, exploitation, and violence. During the movement’s 30th anniversary celebration at the AU in Addis Ababa, delegates demanded permanent representation for children in AU institutions. In the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the movement has participated, for instance, by contributing to the ECOWAS’ Child Protection Framework, advocating for context-sensitive approaches to children on the move, and lobbying during Covid-19 for a regional advisory on children’s rights. Moreover, in Senegal and other countries, they contribute to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) Universal Periodic Reviews. As seen by their participation in Durban, they also try to engage critically with the International Labour Organization (ILO) and question a blanket ban on child labour.

Such forms of engagement by organised working children are not limited to the Senegalese organisation. In fact, they look strikingly similar among other member organisations of the African movement, as well as in the Latin American movement and in Indian organisations. Next to engaging in local child protection efforts, most famously, the movement of working children in Bolivia successfully advocated for a law amendment in the country that lowered the minimum working age to 12 years on the condition that specific protection measures would be in place. Yet, due to a lack of funding for protection and domestic and international criticism, the law was reversed four years later. Beyond such controversial political engagement, representatives of the Latin American movement have participated in global politics. For example, they contributed to the global campaign leading to General Comment No. 26 to the CRC on children’s environmental rights. During the launch of the General Comment in Geneva, the delegates thereby underlined how climate justice would be linked to dignified work.

These examples show that working children are not just beneficiaries of child protection, but already important actors within global child rights governance. Seen this way, children’s claims are not limited to a “right to work”, but rather emphasise context-appropriate protection, recognition of their socio-economic realities and participation in decisions affecting their lives. In current debates, however, this dimension of their claim gets lost. Policy makers and academics tend to overlook how the critique of existing child labour regulation is related to local ideas about what protection should look like – already practised by the movements and deeply embedded in existing approaches.

Recognising Children’s Agency, Rethinking Participation in Protection

The experiences of working children’s movements show that protection and participation cannot easily be separated. As they localise aid and awareness-raising campaigns, these child-led organisations provide continuous, community-embedded support and help children develop confidence, skills, and influence within national politics as well as on the international level. Current child protection programmes – while drawing on the resources and capacities of their supposed beneficiaries – typically do not provide for long-term support for these existing structures. Members and supporters of working children’s movements criticise the fact that complicated project management requirements exclude less educated youth from engaging in their own protection projects. INGOs frequently prioritise short-term, measurable outputs such as schooling initiatives, food aid, or health kits. Such interventions may alleviate hardship in the short term but reinforce dependency rather than strengthening local actors’ own capacities to provide protection even without the support of international actors.

Child protection actors should develop approaches that combine protection and participation on the basis of how children already act as protectors within their respective contexts. Importantly, this includes involving existing child-led initiatives in project design and decision-making processes. This may require moving from specialised short-term interventions to investing in existing child-led structures on a more long-term basis. To move beyond the current deadlock in discussions around child labour regulation between the positions of working children’s movements and international institutions will require that policymakers and international organisations recognise children’s own expertise regarding the forms of support they actually need, rather than dismissing their claims. Concretely, children’s perspectives can help define what forms of work constitute harmful exploitation in their respective context and how to ensure that adolescents have access to adequate training and apprenticeship opportunities that support their transition from school to working life. Moreover, the ways in which organised working children implement NGO programs, support vulnerable peers, and mediate within communities can serve as a key example of how children and youth actors are already important providers of child protection. Recognising them as partners and taking their expertise in protection seriously would not weaken international interventions, but make them more context-sensitive, legitimate, and effective.