By: Manish Singh, Secretary at Manjari Sansthan (WNCB partner in Rajasthan)

The theme for this year’s World Day against Child Labour is “Universal Social Protection for Child Labour”. We observed this day a little differently. We organised individual meetings with the most vulnerable children including school drop outs, children who study and work both, children helping their parents at work, children married below the legal age, home workers and children engaged at different levels of extended supply chain of natural stone.

Today Manjari reached to 147 boys and Girls in 13 WNCB intervention areas in Rajasthan, India. We tried to understand what are the bottlenecks that minimise children’s access to social protection schemes. And we are not surprised with the findings revealing that most of these schemes have somehow taken a shape of  institutional services, and become difficult to access for children who are “out” of these institutions. Unfortunately, in Budhpura we have many children that are excluded.

Our hope is with the institutions of local self governance, to create robust child protection systems at village level. To ensure the well being of the child it is equally important to ensure access of families to right based entitlements. Considering the complexities of grassroots planning and development priorities, this area requires a long term commitment to bring about the desired change. At Manjari, we are aiming at strengthening the Panchayat’s planning capacities thereby pushing the child protection agenda in the Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) processes. We took this opportunity to discuss this issue with Panchayat’s representatives today.

Manjari in collaboration with SFNS repeat the commitment to keep working against child labour and look forward to further strengthen our work.