Shifts in global aid architecture and rising demands have widened the gap between promise and delivery. Сhild Rights Programming offers a way to close it by making systems respond from the start.
1. Design That Delivers: From Rights to Results
Across sectors and contexts, one pattern repeats: rights are acknowledged, but often underdelivered. Programs often miss targets and services fail to adapt. And the children most affected, especially those navigating poverty, discrimination, or displacement, remain excluded from decision-making.
This article introduces Child Rights Governance (CRG) as a design logic that helps governments, NGOs, and development consultancies build responsive systems. The Framework links evidence gathered through participatory methods to what gets planned, funded, and delivered. It’s not tied to a single sector or actor. Governments, civil society, and consultancies alike can use it to design reforms, programs, or services with strategic clarity at national or local level.
As the Cheshire Cat once told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” CRG helps teams define the destination from the start, based on what children and their families say they need. This keeps delivery grounded in reality, not assumptions. This lowers the risk of failure and turns policies, programs, and interventions into solutions that fit the context, use resources wisely, and can grow when needed. That kind of precision matters more than ever in today’s constrained funding landscape.
For governments and development actors, including NGOs, nonprofits, and consultancies delivering programs through tenders, CRG offers a way to frontload delivery risks. It increases legitimacy in fragile contexts and helps countries use funds more efficiently. For donors, it raises the likelihood that resources lead to lasting change.
2. Participation Without Response: Anatomy of a Broken Mechanism
Some systems across government, service delivery, and the development sector are built to consult but not to respond. Participation happens, and voices are heard, but often fail to shape what is funded, delivered, or monitored. The result may be a recurring pattern: resources spent on solutions that miss the mark, services overlooking intersecting needs, and policies falling short in practice. Over time, this undermines both credibility and effectiveness making it harder to deliver lasting impact.
Existing frameworks aim to fix that disconnect. Good governance promotes transparency and accountability. Gender budgeting works to align policies with women’s lived realities. Inclusive programming systematically considers gender, age, disability, and other factors that shape diversity, power, and access. It applies this lens from needs analysis through planning, implementation, and evaluation to ensure meaningful and dignified participation, benefit, and outcomes. Disaggregated data is used to uncover structural inequalities and track progress toward equity. These approaches already link rights to action.
CRG applies the same logic to children, but with a full cycle built in. It starts with evidence gathered directly from children and communities, structured to inform actual planning. It aims at adjusting budgets to match the evidence-based needs. Lastly, the accountability mechanisms, like public follow-up and local review embedded within the CRG keep systems responsive to what was promised.
ACT Global sees this framework as an essential toolset to help governments and development partners get alignment right from the beginning - so time and resources are not spent fixing what could’ve worked the first time.
3. When Systems Don’t See People
Most systems ask communities what they need. Few are built to hear them clearly. And even fewer respond in ways that reflect what was said, especially when lived realities don’t match the categories used in planning.
When the starting point is incomplete, even the most promising interventions struggle to deliver. That’s where things break down. Not because governments or development actors lack intent, but because the way information is gathered often overlooks who’s most at risk of being missed. Needs that cut across gender, geography, disability, or legal status are the first to fall through the cracks.
Instead of asking communities to rank predefined needs, the CRG framework creates space for people, especially children to explain what affects them and when, in their own terms. This approach surfaces what’s usually missed, combining participatory tools with both qualitative insights and quantitative data that reflect lived realities across age, gender, disability, and geography. Just as importantly, the CRG aligns with how institutions plan by helping them to focus on the right inputs from the start. These inputs reflect how children experience gaps. When governments and development actors begin with better information, they avoid the cost of correcting poor fits later.
Based on ACT Global’s experience, listening only works when it is part of real decision-making. That means assessments, dialogues, and scorecards must connect with how policies or interventions are shaped and budgets are set. When done this way, participation moves from being symbolic to being structural.
4. Listening that Shapes the Spending
Participatory data gathering is just a first step – unless it shapes what gets planned and funded, the gap remains. CRG closes that gap by linking participatory findings with the decisions that matter most, setting priorities, deciding where money goes, and which services get delivered. The tools used, like scorecards and child-led dialogues, don’t stop at surfacing problems. They generate inputs for planning documents that institutions already use, such as sector strategy reviews, municipal budget notes, and service delivery work plans. And because CRG processes collect both numbers and narratives, they offer a full picture: quantitative data that maps service reach, and qualitative insights that explain why gaps persist.
Disaggregation is built in. CRG tools capture how needs differ by age, gender, disability, displacement, and geography. That means decisions aren’t based on averages, but on the realities of children and families often left out. When that information guides the plan from the start, it reduces the risk of delays, redesigns, or missed targets later.
5. Closing the Loop: From Delivery to Accountability
Plans that aren’t followed through don’t build trust, but rather raise questions. Most systems report upwards to donors, ministries, or regulators. CRG ensures they also report outward, to children, communities, and those directly affected by delivery.
Accountability under CRG goes beyond compliance. It includes child-led feedback processes, local follow-up tools, community-based monitoring, and public budget tracking. These mechanisms allow governments and development actors to check whether their actions hit the mark and reflect the priorities shared by children or communities.
T achieve this, CRG works within existing planning and reporting structures. It supports the use of participatory findings in national child rights strategies, sector reviews, and SDG reporting cycles. Governments can meet formal requirements, such as CRC submissions or Voluntary National Reviews, while also making space for civil society and children to contribute complementary reports.
For development partners, these tools strengthen learning and adjustment. Field data becomes part of project evaluations, donor reports, and new program design. ACT Global helps partners align this evidence with institutional calendars and formats, ensuring it reaches the right decision points and is clear to both children and officials.
When accountability reflects real experiences, it strengthens delivery, improves trust, and creates systems that learn how to not fail.
6. Where It All Connects
Most systems already collect data, plan interventions, and track performance. But unless those pieces speak to each other, delivery falters. ACT Global works to prevent that disconnect by ensuring the system functions as a whole from the start. We help design initiatives that start with the communities they’re meant to serve. That means gathering the right information, in the right way, and making sure it feeds into planning from the beginning. Our support continues through implementation, where systems are built to stay responsive, and through accountability processes that check whether commitments turned into outcomes.
This approach reflects the logic of Child Rights Governance. It aligns intention with action and ensures each part of the system reinforces the others. When that happens, gaps close earlier. Resources stretch further. People see results that match their realities.
*This article reflects ACT Global’s experience and vision, grounded in the practices and conceptual contributions of international child protection organisations. Furthermore, in articulating the concept of child-centered governance, a significant source of reference was the validated programmatic approaches of Save the Children International — including public investment in children, child-friendly social accountability, and child rights reporting. These international practices provide a valuable framework for reinforcing our approach.
