Radical Youth Accountability: Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Hope and Homes for Children

If society were truly accountable to children, we would not deprive them of their liberty by confining them in institutions. Yet there are currently around 5.4 million children housed in institutions worldwide, generically termed ‘orphanages’. 80% of them are not orphans.

A lack of accountability to children and young people prevents their voices from being heard. They are largely excluded from care decisions – this is especially the case for children with disabilities – and tokenistic practices claiming to include children and young people’s participation often fail to listen to and action their ideas and concerns, stifling young voices and creating an epistemically unjust system. This is deepened by power imbalances in aid (accountability) systems, which currently favour donors in determining what aid should be used for, and leave those who the aid is supposed to benefit with a lack of decision-making power over projects and a lack of power to hold aid organisations accountable.

This Knowledge Transfer Partnership – a collaboration between the University of Leeds and Hope and Homes for Children – seeks to address this issue. Taking as its starting point the complex, often contradictory, nature of what is meant by 'accountability' within the aid sector, the project aims to co-develop with children and young people a definition and practical toolkit for the implementation of child and youth-focussed accountability across Hope and Homes for Children (in the first instance). Working with the organisation, the project will ensure that children and young people are understood as equal partners in the development and delivery of the services designed to support them, and that the organisations is first and foremost accountable to these children and young people. The project will include outreach with wider child and youth-focussed NGOs and CSOs, and international policy makers, as well as advocacy with international donors, to promote this downward or horizontal, rather upward, approach to accountability.