A child forum drives change in Indonesia

When space is made for children to take greater agency in their own lives, transformative change is possible. That's one hope of The World Day of Social Justice, which occurs on February 20. At just 15 years old, Lidia’s experience with a positive parenting project in Indonesia has already generated results.

Home is a remote village participating in the Sekadau Area Program where, as head of her village’s child forum, Lidia has led the charge to get children set up with birth certificates and identity cards. These are crucial for accessing education and health services.

The forum was set up with the support of the positive parenting project to improve child participation in village development. The project trained Lidia and other children through a life skills curriculum and helped them plan, implement and evaluate their own programs for development.

“After assistance from World Vision Indonesia, we developed our own programs,” explains Lidia. “Child monitoring is one of our programs. In this program, we came to every house and monitored birth certificate and child identity card ownership in [several villages].”

Lidia’s team discovered that 12 children lacked birth certificates and 42 possessed no identity cards. The child forum took the further initiative to collect documentation from the parents and submit them to the government for registration.

The end result was that six children have since received birth certificates and 21 children now have identity cards. Because the registrations were facilitated by the child forum, parents even saved money by not having to process the registrations independently.

“Parents and children were very happy because they were helped to process birth certificates and child identity cards,” says Lidia. “Those civil rights documents can be used by them for school registration and to access other social services such as social health insurance.”

The child forum’s work has gone on to influence further development by other actors. Spurred on by the forum the government is now conducting direct registrations. More parents—made increasingly aware of child rights—are stepping forward to process birth certificates independently for their children. In this way transformational development is increasingly taking place in the lives of vulnerable children.

*NOTE: This story was originally published in World Vision Canada's 2024 Annual Report.