CHILD Home
Welcome to Children in Local Development
CHILDuses community participation and local level action to help development projects have greater IMPACTand SUSTAINABILITY.
CHILD was developed by the World Food Programme in Ethiopia and has been proven to work by more than 300 school feeding communities in Ethiopia. Read more about the approach behind CHILD…
Inspired by the achievements of the Ministry of Education and World Food Programme, the CHILD Trust and CHILD Ethiopia have been started to bring the benefits of CHILD to many more schools.
Share on facebook | Subscribe to our email newsletter | Unsubscribe from our newsletter
The average pass rate was 13 percentage points higher in CHILD schools than standard project schools. More…
How does CHILD work?
CHILD facilitates local leaders (they can be social leaders as well as formal ones) to help their community to help themselves. CHILD focuses on schools and educating the next generation as a starting point. But it can lead to much more. The programme is based on the belief that every human being has the creativity and energy to give their children a better future.
Why doesn't this stuff happen already?
It can seem strange that important things like clean water, enough school classrooms, and good sanitation are not being built by communities if they already have the potential to make a difference. There are, however, some good reasons for this.
First is the collective action problem identified by a writer called Mancur Olson. His insight was that when a lot of people want something it is actually less likely to happen than if only a few people want it. Why? Because when many people will benefit from a change, then each individual bears the total cost of the investment that they have to make, but only get a small proportion of the return. The temptation is to let other people pu the effort into making the change because you will also benefit from their hard work. So everybody waits for everybody else.
However, CHILD manages to get a few people to make a big difference in their communities! We are able to do this by reducing the transaction cost of people who invest in changes that will benefit everyone. By creating a supportive and encouraging environment for the people that lead changes under CHILD, they benefit from the social recognition and status that being a change maker brings. This also encourages more people to join in to share the hard work - and make a bigger impact.
A second problem is knowing where to start when a community faces so many challenges. CHILD deals with this by focusing on primary schools. Everybody can agree that the education of the next generation is of vital importance, so this helps us to bring people together with a focus.
The last problem is thinking that the changes that are needed are too big a too expensive to do. For example, to build a new concrete classroom will cost far too much for a community. However, they can afford to build a classroom out of local materials using traditional techniques. CHILD promotes feasible and appropriate solutions such as this; and connects people with good technical information to make sure that their projects are successful.
So now you know how CHILD can achieve so much with so little!
