Daphne-CHILD

Violence remains endemic across Europe and affects children in all communities and contexts. Often, children's voices and experiences are absent in discussions related to preventing and tackling forms of violence against children, including in designing child protection systems.

To address these issues, Eurochild and Terres des hommes have launched the Daphne-CHILD programme, which is a collaborative initiative with the mission to empower grassroots civil society organisations (CSOs) to combat violence against children through a comprehensive 3-year sub-granting and capacity-building programme.

Funded by the European Union's Citizen, Equality, Values and Rights Daphne-Programme, the initiative is active in nine European countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, and Ukraine, and aims to distribute 1.3 million Euro in sub-grants to support impactful national and local interventions that enhance the lives of children and young people.

The importance of including children's voices

Children's meaningful participation is at the heart of our programme, so each project we fund will integrate children's perspectives in both the design and implementation phases, ensuring their voices shape the activities aimed at protecting and empowering them.

To identify meaningful and effective solutions, not only do organisations working on the ground with victims need to be engaged and supported to tackle the issues at hand; children themselves need to be at the core of discussions and planning around combatting violence against children. Children are experts in their own lives, who understand best what makes them feel safe, as well as unsafe. It is vital that they are given meaningful spaces to share this expertise and support the development of strategies and solutions for combatting violence in their communities, as well as at national and European level. 

Responding to the needs of grassroots organisations

As Eurochild and Terre des hommes work directly with their member organisations and country offices, we have first-hand knowledge of the needs of grassroots organisations working with children growing up in marginalised circumstances, in particular children in alternative care, children in socio-economically disadvantaged situations, children with disabilities, Roma children, asylum seeking children and children in minority groups. The organisations we work with include service providing organisations as well as other CSOs. Many of these organisations do not have the capacity, well-trained staff nor the financial means, to engage directly with children to ensure child protection services for child victims of abuse are child-rights based and child-friendly.

Strengthening civil society organisations

The grants will strengthen CSOs to set up or advocate for more child-friendly and child-rights based child protection services with direct involvement of children. In this way children growing up in marginalised circumstances will be able to directly contribute to better child protection services and will allow for their opinions to be heard.

Proven models of work and collaboration

Eurochild’s tried and tested models of work, both in multi-level advocacy campaigns involving national and local civil society, and participatory approaches of working directly with children and young people, are core to this programme.

Combined with our direct influencing of EU policymaking and funding allocation, this approach based on top-down bottom-up influencing and capacity building has proven to foster a positive dynamic between European, national and community levels to create positive outcomes for children and families.

Terre des Hommes’ expertise in developing professional engagement through its cross-border and multilingual ChildHub is highly complementary to Eurochild’s model of work.

Cross-European learning

The Daphne-CHILD programme has been designed in a manner that maximises the opportunities for cross-European learning, by providing applicable lessons and assets for use and implementation in other countries across Europe through a multiplier effect.

Evidence and experiences of grassroots CSOs involved in the programme are expected to inform Eurochild’s work and the EU’s ongoing work around issuing recommendations for integrated child protection systems for EU Member States.