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IDRAAK - Alternative
Education for Child Rights
The
curriculum, “IDRAAK”, provides an interactive environment to
the child rights activists to learn about the child related
laws in Pakistan and the concerned articles of the CRC. It is
based on the mechanics of a game. It seeks from one team to
explain different forms of child rights violations one by one
from a set of cards and from the second team sitting in front
to tell as to which law or article of the CRC is applied to
the particular violation as mentioned on the second set of
flashcards. The “technique” was developed by IFP in view of
the lack of understanding of the child rights activists about
the child-rights-related laws of the land and the CRC.
IFP had in
fact developed IDRAAK during the Punjab phase of CBTP, for its
workshop “Instruments on Child Labor and Violence in
Pakistan”. The idea was to enable the partners to learn
necessarily about different national laws concerning children
such as Employment of Children’s Act, Mines Act, Factories
Act, Shop Establishment Act and Transport Workers Act and the
concerning articles of the CRC so that they are able to
effectively undertake the advocacy programs for the
restoration of the rights of the children in their
communities. However later, with the success of the curriculum
in the CBTP, IFP considered it worth a try in different
capacity building programs that were requested by different
donors for their partners or by the partners themselves. So,
this is how this “technique” became a training and orientation
curriculum and got added recognition for its effectiveness and
uniqueness in Pakistan.
Curriculum for Training on Child
Rights related Laws
The concept
of child rights is complex for many to understand in relation
to different national laws and the CRC. More often we observe
that child rights activists and teachers in our country find
themselves in a great difficulty when it comes to the
discussion on child rights. And it is quite needless to stress
that advocacy on child rights becomes only a shallow slogan
unless one has knowledge about different laws and agreements.
The necessity of this knowledge is not only crucially relevant
to the child rights activists, teachers and parents, but also
to children, in which we see hope of change. Normally it is
very difficult to sensitize children about their rights in
legal terms if we talk about their involvement at all. And
there is no disagreement to the fact that it must be something
very competitive and spell-binding for children, otherwise the
entire exercise only yields frustration.
Many
organizations in Pakistan have in fact tried over the past
decade to bring out alternative educational material on the
rights of the children. But after the analyses we can safely
say that most of it is quite general. It fails to provide
insight to the children about hidden and apparent forms of
child rights violations in the cultural context vis-à-vis laws
and agreements. On the contrary, all such material only adds
to the tons that are already on their shoulders in formal or
informal education schools. Here we must not doubt the
sincerity of the organizations, but concerns seriously remain
regarding the impact of rights-based education from the
perspective of advocacy. The problem is that people don’t know
about their legal and constitutional rights. This unawareness
makes the policy makers accountable of their deeds and the
people isolated from the political process. These bitter
realities had sufficient reasons to motivate IFP towards
designing of a curriculum which should enable the development
workers and the children to learn about child rights in some
practical terms. IDRAAK or “Consciousness” emerged as the
result of this motivation.
IDRAAK or
“Consciousness” is basically a game devised by IFP during the
first phase of CBTP. This game consists upon a set of cards of
two colors. One type of cards illustrates and describes
different situations of child rights violations in our
cultural context whereas the other type of cards carry
corresponding national laws and articles of CRC.
Two teams, A
and B, are required to play the game. Each team contains not
more than 13 members. The cards of situations are distributed
among Team A and the cards that contain laws are distributed
among the members of Team B. Now, a member from Team A reads
out a card. The team members of Team B are required to quickly
give a reading to their cards. If any law on the card matches
the situation, the member(s) reads out the law(s). For each
reading of the law, 10 marks are allocated to the Team B. This
is how it goes until all the cards of the situations are
finished. When the game ends, the positions are inverted; Team
B replaces the role of Team A and the game goes on. In the
end, the marks of both the teams are calculated and the
winning team is given a prize.
IFP has
treated IDRAAK at two levels during the past two years. At the
first level was its utility in CBTP as a tool to acquaint the
child rights activists with different national child related
laws and the articles of the CRC, for effective designing and
implementation of the advocacy programs. At the second level,
IFP provided training to different child rights activists and
schoolteachers on how to use this tool in further giving
orientation to their staff members and children about child
rights.
To start
with, IFP held two launching ceremonies of IDRRAK during July
2002 to June 2003. These events were held at Lahore and
Islamabad, with mid-level organizations, donors and government
line departments. In the events, the organization threw light
on its experience of IDRAAK as an effective tool. While IFP
got a combination of jaded and very apprehensive response from
the line departments on the tone of the curriculum, various
development organizations took great interest in getting
training. The donor too recommended their partners strongly to
reach IFP in this regard and get its training.
As for the
training to child rights activists and school teachers, IFP
carried out a number of trainings on IDRAAK in different
provinces during the past year. The details of the trainings
are given below.
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