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The purpose of this study was to explore 232 service providers’ and policymakers’ experiences of supporting children’s well-being during the pandemic, across sectors, in 22 countries – including Kenya, the Philippines, South Africa, India, Scotland, Sweden, Canada and the USA, in the last quarter of 2020.

A smartphone survey delivered via a custom-built app containing mostly open-ended questions was used. Respondents were recruited via professional networks, newsletters and social media. Qualitative content analysis was used.

The findings reveal numerous system-level challenges to supporting children’s well-being, particularly virus containment measures, resource deficiencies and inadequate governance and stakeholder coordination. Those challenges compounded preexisting inequalities and poorly affected the quality, effectiveness and reach of services. As a result, children’s rights to an adequate standard of living; protection from violence; education; play; and right to be heard were impinged upon. Concurrently, the findings illustrate a range of adaptive and innovative practices in humanitarian and subsistence support; child protection; capacity-building; advocacy; digitalisation; and psychosocial and educational support. Respondents identified several priority areas – increasing service capacity and equity; expanding technology use; mobilising cross-sectoral partnerships; involving children in decision-making; and ensuring more effective child protection mechanisms.

This study seeks to inform resilience-enabling policies and practices that foster equity, child and community empowerment and organisational resilience and innovation, particularly in anticipation of future crises.

Using a novel approach to gather in-the-moment insights remotely, this study offers a unique international and multi-sectoral perspective, particularly from low- and middle-income countries.

Female smallholder farmers in low-income countries face barriers to accessing capital and commodity markets. While agricultural cooperatives provide services that contribute to the income and productivity of small-scale producers, evidence of cooperatives' social and economic empowerment of female smallholders remains limited. We apply Sen's capability approach to female entrepreneurs' socioeconomic empowerment to examine whether women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative from rural western Uganda benefits their social and economic position within their household. First, we study the relationship between women's cooperative participation and their household coffee sales and savings. Second, we investigate the link between women's cooperative participation and their intra-household decision-making and whether the inclusion of the husband in his wife's cooperative strengthens or lowers women's decision-making power.

We carry out a case study of a hybrid coffee and microfinance cooperative that promotes social innovation through the integration and empowerment of female smallholders in rural Uganda. Using a cross-sectional survey of 411 married female cooperative members from 26 randomly selected self-help groups of Bukonzo Joint Cooperative and 196 female non-members from the identical area, employing propensity score matching, this paper investigates the benefits of women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative in the Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda. We present and discuss the results of our case study within an extensive literature on the role of institutions in collective action for women's empowerment.

Our findings provide new empirical evidence on female smallholders' participation in mixed cooperatives. Our results indicate that women's participation in microfinance-producer cooperatives appears to be a conditional blessing: even though membership is linked to increased women's intra-household decision-making and raised household savings and income from coffee sales, a wife with a husband in the same cooperative self-help group is associated with diminished women's household decision-making power.

The focus of this study is on female coffee smallholders in an agricultural cooperative in rural western Uganda. In particular, we focus on a case study of one major coffee cooperative. Our cross-sectional survey does not allow us to infer causal interpretations. Also, the survey does not include variables that allow us to measure other dimensions of women's empowerment beyond decision-making over household expenditures and women's financial performance related to savings and income from coffee cultivation.

Our empirical results indicate that female smallholders' cooperative membership is associated with higher incomes and coffee sales. However, husband co-participation in their wives' cooperative group diminishes wives' decision-making, which suggests that including husbands and other family members in the same cooperative group may not be perceived as an attractive route to empowerment for female smallholders. For these reasons, an intervention that encourages the cooperation of both spouses and that is sensitive to context-specific gender inequalities, may be more successful at stimulating social change toward household gender equality than interventions that focus on women's autonomous spheres only.

While the literature thus far has focused on microfinance's potential for women's empowerment, evidence on agricultural cooperatives' affecting women's social and economic position is limited. First, our findings provide novel empirical evidence on the empowering effects of women's participation in a self-help group-based coffee cooperative in rural Uganda. Second, our data allows us to explore the role of husbands' participation in their wives' cooperative and SGH. We embed our hypotheses and empirical results in a rich discussion of female entrepreneurship, microfinance and cooperative literature.

Drawing on key concepts from childhood studies, this chapter provides a theoretical grounding for children's participation rights in research on maltreatment. The chapter discusses the sociology of childhood, tracing how it brought a focus to children's participation in research, and introduces the concepts of adultism and childism to help critique children's participation in research on maltreatment. The chapter is framed by a familiar debate on tensions between children's right to participate and their right to protection. It explores the relevance of these debates for research on child maltreatment. Through its discussion, the chapter explores key issues that have traditionally led to children being kept out of research on child maltreatment. It argues that children's participation is key to advancing knowledge on child maltreatment and fundamentally a way to uphold children's human rights. The concepts introduced in this chapter are threaded and explored throughout the subsequent chapters of the book, in their examination and reflections on children's participation in research on maltreatment.

Increased emphasis is being placed on developing creative approaches when working with children in research settings, especially with sensitive research topics like violence against children. Community art is a social form of art that gives artists the opportunity to work in collaboration with the public, with the aim of highlighting and addressing specific social issues. This chapter reflects on an art exhibition organised in Reykjavík called Wishes of Icelandic Children. The project was a collaboration between artists and children. The aim of the chapter is to present how an art exhibition may put violence that children experience into focus and encourage attendees to reflect on the subject by looking at descriptive pictures and texts from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and then writing comments about their thoughts and feelings. The research questions are: How do children express themselves about sensitive topics such as abuse and violence? Can community art enable professionals to better support increased participation of children in discussions about abuse and violence? This study involved a qualitative thematic analysis of comments written by children after having seen the exhibition. Three students took part in the analysis process as co-researchers. The exhibition was successful in creating a platform where children could express themselves on topics concerning abuse and violence. Many comments expressed an ardent desire to end violence in society, especially emphasising bullying, which can limit young people's capacity to feel safe and express themselves.

This chapter discusses how to involve children and young people in decisions and encourage them to express their needs and participate in the decision-making process to develop a quality intervention. By describing the different aspects of projects involving a participatory approach, it shows how giving voice to children and young people unlocked new perspectives regarding the Hungarian child protection system. Participation of children in research is limited in Hungary, partly due to the challenging legislation and authorisation process. This chapter shows how research to develop child-friendly digital tools can contribute to collecting children's views on their needs related to child protection support, and how the process of listening to children can improve parenting and caregiving responses to the needs of younger and older children living with their families or in the child protection system. The chapter analyses the effect of digital applications on children's and young people's capacity to advance towards autonomy, including applications and a video campaign with short video clips created by young people. These projects gave an opportunity for children and youth in the public care system to describe their lives and wishes for the future. The analysis found: (a) for a functional child protection system and to promote development for children and young people, children's voices need to be amplified; (b) by expressing their voices, children become more autonomous; (c) children's voices contribute to decreasing social prejudices against children and young people in public care; and (d) listening to children and youth who age out of care can help professionals working in the child protection system better understand their beneficiaries.

This study aims to determine how school-based management (SBM) capacity developed through international cooperation functioned to overcome challenges during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Nepal.

The research structure was designed based on the success case method. The researchers conducted a questionnaire survey of head teachers to understand schools’ responses during the COVID-19 pandemic period, identified likely success-case schools, held workshops at the likely success-case schools and conducted in-depth interviews with head teachers and school management committee (SMC) members to understand how SBM functioned and contributed to the success cases.

Storytelling from the success-case schools provided reliable evidence that the localised approaches of SBM are effective for planning and implementing suitable responses at school. The reviews of the head teachers showed that both head teachers and teachers had strong leadership and understood the importance of collaboration with teachers, SMC members, Parent Teacher Association (PTA), guardians and students. Although the research could not show clear evidence of a causal relationship between their achievement and Japan’s project input, the success-case schools clearly benefited from the head teachers’ appropriate execution of SBM with their strong leadership as well as the collaborative efforts of the stakeholders.

The research tries to clarify the influence of the effects of SBM capacity development projects by analysing the changes of head teachers and teachers through the storytelling aspect of the success case method with in-depth consideration of actual school responses during the emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Involvement of children in research on different aspects of children's rights, including research on violence against children, is continuously increasing, as is the interest in participatory approaches (European Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA], 2014; Larsson et al., 2018; UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2011). Svevo-Cianci et al. (2011) noted that ‘as researchers commit to learning from community members, including children and adolescents themselves, it has become more clear that an understanding of the lived reality and definition of violence for children in their individual communities, is essential to envision and implement effective child protection’ (p. 985).

In this chapter, the legislative context regarding children's rights to be heard and participate is initially discussed; currently applied age requirements for children to acquire rights across the countries of the European Union (EU) are briefly presented; and children's potential roles and relevant provisions for their participation in social research are explored. The last part is dedicated to the presentation and discussion of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; Regulation [EU] 2016/679, 2016) – specifically, children's personal data–related recitals and articles; the importance of the definition of a legal basis for personal data processing according to the GDPR, including consent; and the necessary information to be provided to children before their data are processed.

This paper aims to provide an evaluation of the new education system, based on Life Skills and Citizenship Education (LSCE), in Egyptian primary schools. This study analyzes how effective could be the implementation of LSCE in the process of constructing active democratic citizens, in particular, in the case of Egypt, highlighting problems facing the new education approach.

The study methodologies are twofold; the content analysis of the primary one new curriculum “Discover”, to assess the curriculum's strengths and weakness; and the questionnaire to the primary six students, to investigate the relationship among the twelve life skills.

Content analysis of the textbook shows that the learning process based on LSCE is appropriate for the construction of active citizens. The textbook provides Egyptian children with the necessary opportunities to learn and create, through creative participatory methods. The relationship between the social dimension and other dimensions has been proven by means of the chi-square test. The relationship between participation and the two approximately absent skills “resilience and empathy” has been clarified as both are strongly interrelated with participation. The results illuminate a strong relationship between participation and the remaining life skills.

More questionnaires are needed to assess the grade of life skills achievement among students in grade one and two, as it is regarded one of the limitations of the present study, owing to the complicated procedures and the limited time.

The research suggests the formulation of wider project-based activities to be included in the textbooks of all the primary grades. In this regard, real contribution with NGOs and local governments shall be developed to facilitate the involvement of children in actual projects, in accordance with their ages, and to encourage students to participate, as they notice the efficient results of their contribution.

The research stresses on the importance of enhancing participation, as it is proven through the chi-square test that it is strongly related to other skills.

The scarcity of analytical studies to evaluate the effectiveness of citizenship education programs on children, after the application of the new Egyptian education system.