Philippines

Towards Making Cities Child-Friendly: Evolving UNICEF Experience in the Philippines
This major urban programme, launched in 1999, covers 20 provinces and five cities: Pasay City, Manila and Quezon City in Metro Manila, Cebu City in the Visayas and Davao City in Mindanao. It builds on a long history of urban interventions in the Philippines, starting with studies in 1990 to 1992 on urban children in distress in four cities. This work accelerated with the 1992 Mayors as Defenders of Children initiative and the 1993 League of Cities of the Philippines Declaration of Commitment to Children.

It is also informed by the lessons learned from the Urban Basic Services (UBS) programmes of the past, taking the strengths of such programmes - community organization and participation, multi-agency and multi-sectoral planning and programming - and places them in an Urban Poor Development framework. This requires advocacy and capacity building at higher levels, disaggregation of high quality data, sustainability and institutionalization.

The strategy for the GOP-UNICEF Fifth Country Programme for Children (CPC 1999-2003) focuses on the transformation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child from a legal framework into a well-defined, nationwide Child-Friendly Movement (CFM) involving families, communities and local and national governments, as well as the private sector. The movement is goal-oriented and includes establishing and monitoring child-friendly neighbourhoods, schools, health facilities, media, work places, religious communities, barangays, municipalities, cities and provinces. It has three interrelated components: communication; local policy and institutional development; and strategic programme support to health, nutrition, education, child protection, and gender and development. The strategy mix includes major investments in advocacy, technical support and capacity building, with model building and service delivery focused on the selected provinces and cities to reduce disparities. This geographic coverage is narrower than in previous country programmes, but reflects a more deliberate and conscious effort to demonstrate multi-sectoral and multi-level advocacy and programming for children involving various actors and stakeholders within a manageable set of geographic areas.

The programme has very specific goals:

Maximizing leadership role of city mayors;
Increasing public education and awareness of a new vision for children;
Formulating a city development plan for children;
Continuing situation analysis for advocacy, programming and monitoring;
Annual reporting on the state of the city's children;
Building partnerships and expanding alliances for children;
Empowering families through community organizing and community development;
Strengthening networks and systems for children in need of special protection;
Strengthening legislation and law enforcement.

Its future challenges include:

Continuing advocacy, monitoring and technical follow-up actions;
Ensuring institutional mechanisms are in place;
Enabling effective and meaningful community participation;
Expanding alliances for children;
Professionalising the League of Cities

The CFC Secretariat has produced an in-depth documentation on the Child Friendly Movement in the Philippines. See Good practices section of this website.

Contact
Leopoldo M. Moselina, Project Officer
UNICEF Manila
P.O. Box 1076
Makati Central Post Office
1250 Makati City
Philippines 1200
Telephone (632) 892.0611 through 25
Fax 892.8126
E-mail lmoselina@unicef.org