Universal Children’s Day reaches 18
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WAGGGS commemorates Universal Children’s Day on 20 November with a call to celebrate the 18th birthday of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. UNICEF’s Voices of Youth is creating an online art exhibition and we encourage Girl Guides and Girl Scouts around the World to submit their contributions. See ‘What you can do’ below for the details. WAGGGS and UNICEF have been partners for many years. In 2003 we signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish even closer relations working around the WAGGGS ‘Our Rights Our Responsibility’ framework. Our two organisations published modules for the framework and used the internet platform “Voices of Youth” to involve young people around the world. This cooperation subsequently resulted in several national co-operations involving WAGGGS Member Organisations, including, among others, Kenya, Burundi, Guyana, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, El Salvador, Maldives, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Since its launch in 2005, which involved WAGGGS World Board Deputy Chair Mary Lynn Myers, WAGGGS also contributes to the Unite For Children, Unite Against AIDS global campaign.
WAGGGS theme ‘Our Rights, Our Responsibilities’ is based on the Convention of the Rights of the Child. Almost all of our Member Organisations conduct projects or programmes on one or more of the six rights which WAGGGS has identified:
girls worldwide say “I have the right to be me”
girls worldwide say “we have the right to be heard”
girls worldwide say “we have the right to be happy”
girls worldwide say “we have the right to work together”
girls worldwide say “we have the right to learn”
girls worldwide say “we have the right to live in peace”
For more information on these projects please visit the project section.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child was agreed in 1989 when world leaders decided that children needed a special convention just for them because people under 18 years old (children) often need special care and protection that adults do not. The leaders also wanted to make sure that the world recognized that children have human rights too. Although the Convention has 54 articles in all, it is guided by four fundamental principles: non-discrimination (article 2), the best interests of the child (article 3), survival, development and protection (article 6) and participation (article 12). To find out more, have a look on the youth friendly interactive version of the Convention.
Due to its continuous work to promote children’s rights WAGGGS was awarded the Child Rights Prize together with WOSM by the Italian Parliamentary Committee on the Child in 2005.
What you can do
Submit your art work for the online art exhibition on UNICEF’s voices of youth. Choose one of the articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and submit your artistic interpretation of it. Your art piece can be in the form of a painting, collage or photo, so be creative! You can submit your art piece by mail or email. Please see the Voices of youth website for contact details and further information.
Deadline for submissions is 20 November 2007.
Deadline for submissions is 20 November 2007.
We look forward to seeing many contributions from Girl Guides and Girl Scouts around the world!
Tell us about it
Use the comment section below to tell us how you commemorate Universal Children’s Day with your sisters in Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting.
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