Citizens 4 Change (C4C)

Violence towards children costs East Africa $20 billion annually & inhibits the region’s aspirations to develop inclusively. The return from investing in Education for All is undermined if children live with toxic stress that arises from their experience of violence. Schools should be a place of protection, but in Tanzania 96% of children who co-created this project described situations where they or their peers had experienced violence. 35% of these violations were perpetrated by male teachers. Partnering with children and the institution that best represents their lived experience, the Junior Councils, the solution seeds a child led movement for school safety & inclusion, by revealing their lived experience & equipping them with digital tools & know how to facilitate change in complex settings. A scaled solution provides a decolonised understanding of children’s lived experience of safety & inclusion; & demonstrates the agency, wisdom & solidarity that children are capable of. 

Citizens 4 Change is a social lab, a container for social experiments that seeks to understand & resolve the complex social challenge of violence against children in East Africa.
Peak youth & high levels of violence against children prevent East Africa from developing inclusively. More than 50% of East Africans are under the age of 18. Violence & maltreatment of children costs East Africa over $20 billion annually.

• 64% of children & youth in East Africa report experiencing physical violence. This equates to 73.5 million people. 
• 22% of children & youth, or 26.5 million people, report experiencing sexual violence. 
• 26% of children & youth, or 30.8 million people, report experiencing  emotional violence. 

Child victims of physical, sexual or emotional abuse and violence carry a burden that negatively affects their well-being, functioning & productivity over their lifetime.
During a recent pilot of our solution with 261 Tanzanian children in schools, 96% of the children were able to describe recent situations where they or their peers had experienced violence. 35% of these violations were perpetrated by their male teachers.

The solution seeds a child led movement for school safety & inclusion by equipping children in 18 Junior Councils to use digital & face to face tools to co-create the conditions for safety & inclusion in Tanzanian schools. 

72 young leaders will participate in the C4C change makers programme, delivered via mobile app & Zoom, equipping them to survey others, to facilitate generative conversations & to manage projects. 

They will use the app to find out about 1,500 children’s lived experience of safety in school. Open source data dashboards will reveal the prevalence & nature of violence & children’s help seeking behaviours.  

Children's data literacy will be enhanced so that they can make sense the findings. They will brainstorm, select & prototype their own solutions to school safety. Users will rate prototypes'  effectiveness. Children will seek to understand why some work to enhance safety & why some do not.

Social Network Analyses will identify relational ties that protect children; identifying an 2,025 child protectors & widening the circle of care.  

Children will host a Solutions Summit inviting government, funders & school leaders to see their successful solutions & plan for how these could scale in other schools & regions. 

Physical (88%) & psychological (69%) violence towards Tanzanian children in schools is normalised with most children experiencing harm. Efforts are underway by civil society, funders & Government to create safe schools as a pathway to eliminating violence against women and children. However, children themselves are sidelined from these endeavours; either treated as passive victims or blamed for their behaviour. They have not been recognised as sources of solutions to school-based violence; nor as service users to whom teachers & school authorities are accountable. The long-term effect of this is that children do not learn skills to become agents of change as adults; & the cycle of abuse continues. 

This solution was co-created with 7 Junior Councils, children who are elected by their peers & who represent young people’s interests in villages, districts & ultimately at a national level. In spite of the opportunity presented by the Junior Council structure these fora have not been resourced & many have lapsed as fads for supporting child participation ebb & flow amongst funders. This project counters this situation by investing in the processes, tools & data that would support a sustained child led movement to address school-based violence. 

Children within the Junior council leadership will operationalise the project, will learn how to collect data using mobile apps, to facilitate generative conversations, to act on safeguarding concerns & to manage projects. They will survey their peers & adults, organise the prototyping process, host a Solutions Summit to profile their solutions & be supported to advocate for the scaling up of successful prototypes in other schools & regions. 

In doing so, Citizens 4 Change will built its youth community of child protectors; contributing to its goal to protect 136,000 children from harm by the end of 2023, by catalysing, tapping into, & learning from the collective intelligence of a crowd of child protectors in East Africa.

Violence & the associated toxic stress inhibits children's ability to learn. Education investments are undermined if we do not ensure that children are safe in school settings. 

The solution seeds a child led movement for school safety & inclusion, that starts from children’s own lived experience & equips them with digital tools & know how to facilitate change. 

88% of children in Tanzanian schools who experience harm may benefit as they & their youth representatives understand the system in which violence occurs, ideate & prototype child led solutions; & promote their impact at an annual child led Solutions Summit.  

Citizen 4 Change is working towards proof of concept by 2023, by catalysing, tapping into, & learning from the collective intelligence of a crowd of child protectors in East Africa. We have 

- developed our tech platform; 
- recruited 16,151 child protectors (15,638 in Tanzania, 513 in Uganda)
- undertaken a school violence prevalence study with 10,000 public servants, students, parents & teachers.
In the last 6 months, we collaborated with 7 Junior Councils to answer the question "How to ensure that all children are safe in school?" 261 children were surveyed about their experience of harm & protection, participated workshops to co-create their visions for safe & inclusive schools, brainstormed & voted for their ideas for home-grown solutions to violence. This Solution has been co-created with these students as an opportunity to re-animate Junior Councils nationally & to seed a child led movement for safe & inclusive schools. 

C4Cs innovation is to use the wisdom of the crowd to protect children from violence. We are piloting an innovation that will protect 136,000 children from harm by catalysing, tapping into, & learning from the collective intelligence of a crowd of child protectors in East Africa. 

Our tech platform does not rely on data & is accessible for people on the digital margins. Bespoke digital & face to face tools are used to facilitate transformative change in complex settings; adapting the Theory U process so that it can be facilitated in virtual meetings, in face to face workshops & via our SMS & mobile platform. 

Our decolonised stance towards research does not extract data from people, but listens deeply to their lived experience; helping them to make sense of the system in which violence arises & to undertake collective action to create solutions that are grounded in their context. 

The social network analyses are pioneering in the field of child protection; identifying the individuals that children go to for information, for advice & to report violence. The analyses reveals the social ties that keep children safe & the citizen protectors who are key to widening the circle of care. 

By partnering with us CSOs are enabled to demonstrate real time social impact being created with and for children. Local government authorities can track progress being made in combating violence against children, and funders can tap into a critical mass of child protectors who prevent and respond to violence against children.

In 2020 we enrolled 16,151 child protectors, exceeding our target by 3,151. In 2021 we aim to enrol 26,000 child protectors, 52,000 in 2022, and be ready to scale to Rwanda & reach 104,000 protectors/year by early 2024.

At the end of 2023 we plan to have achieved proof of concept, based on the functioning of the tech, the engagement of protectors with the Citizens 4 Change community, the number of protectors and the outcomes for children who have been protected. Targets for the subsequent five years will be agreed then.  

In terms of the numbers of children protected; in 2020 [first full year of our operations] we worked on developing a methodology to better track how many children are protected and outcomes for them. This takes the form of a quarterly survey that seeks to generate data about the social value being created by citizen protectors. In 2021, we anticipate 39,000 children being protected; in 2022 that figure should rise to 78,000, and in 2023 it should reach 136,000.

Key performance indicators are:

• Performance of the tech, and particularly the SMS delivery rates; monitored via our SMS tracking platform and user surveys. 
• Number of child protectors enrolled, Citizen 4 Change's engagement with the community, number of children protected and outcomes for them: Tracked with a quarterly SMS survey that goes out to all protectors on our system, the results of which are analysed and published on our KPI tracker.  
• The Return on Social Investment. A forecast calculation was conducted in 2021, estimating that for every $1 invested in C4C there was a social return equivalent to $3. The responses from the above survey will provide data for an annual calculation of the actual monetary value that is created from the groundswell of protectors. Social value accounts are kept alongside our financial accounts. 
• Validation of our design assumptions that Small World Networks transmit protective social norms, that social capital can be cultivated and that protectors are intrinsically motivated is tested via our social network analytics which are conducted every 6 months.
• Amount of catalytic finance secured, & the number of civil society clients & partners; monitored using our CRM system & Xero financial management system.
• Project activities are monitored using a simple monitoring survey that the Junior Council leaders will complete each month using the mobile app.  

17 people work on the team

• 3 full-time
• 5 contractors 
• 6 freelance facilitators 
• 1 research collaborator
• 2 part time volunteers

Dr McAlpine has 25+ years experience working in child protection in East Africa, as a service provider for children living on the streets, an advocate for legal reform, a strategist positioning civil society organisations in the sector, and as a researcher on child protection. 

She has a PhD in Human Development; and her dissertation explored the worldview of Tanzanians who protect children, generating a theory to enable more & better protection. C4C is an applied experiment putting that theory into action. 

The team has extensive multi-disciplinary experience across East Africa in facilitating change in complex settings; community based development, advocacy with Government, safeguarding, process design, action research, data management, USSD platforms and Filemaker databases. 

50% of the team members are under 30 and the Tanzanian lead on this solution is a Junior Council alumni. 72 leaders from the Junior Councils will form the backbone of this project; and will become team members responsible for operationalising the project, data collection, facilitation, safeguarding and project management. 

We have an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policy & enforce the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act. We demonstrate that EDI is integral to our identity by

• Distributing leadership throughout the organisation. 
• Having zero tolerance for discrimination, intimidation, bullying or harassment.
• Creating an environment that values authenticity & enables every individual to be themselves. 
• Adopting a posture of deep listening, reflection & consciousness-raising that creates an environment in which individual differences & the contributions of all our team are recognised & valued & where difference is celebrated.
• Building relationships & connections across networks that generates collective action.
• Having procedures that design out bias; including flexible, family-friendly workplaces; transparent support for career progression; job specifications that are gender neutral; and recruitment processes that are unbiased &/or hire for difference.

Equality, diversity and inclusion is promoted within the wider Citizens 4 Change community of citizen protectors by

• Creating messaging that is tailored to participants’ preferred channel, language & content. 
• Supporting members to operate in collaborative & inclusive ways, to become aware of their unconscious bias, & to develop cross-racial & gender sensitive skills & sensibilities. 
• Sharing learning & good practice with other practitioners & academics. 
• Communicating in ways that defy stereotypes & using unbiased language.
• Marketing Citizens 4 Change to attract young people, women, people with disabilities & minorities. 

The opportunity to be part of a community that provides a safe space to reflect on our practice and to explore our blindspots. In the next couple of years C4C will start transitioning from an organisation led by the charismatic founder to one that is sustained by its purpose, processes and products. Joining MIT Solve would link our leadership to a peers who may be further along that journey and whose wisdom can aid us in navigating that transition. 

MIT Solve links us to opportunities for exposure in the media and conferences where we can share our learning about the nature of prosocial action in East Africa, countering the negative narrative about the region with positive stories of change from people’s lived experience. 

We would also benefit from data about funders’ perspectives, and access to funding opportunities & in kind support for our legal & tech needs as they evolve. 

• Recruitment of a partnership & grants writing manager
• Speaking opportunities to share our learning
• Technical advice on the applicability of machine learning
• Links to potential clients & funders.

MIT Gov Lab - Explore how our tech and the data that is being generated could be deployed &/or inform their research in East Africa. 

MIT Center for Organizational Learning and the Presencing Institute - Sharing learning about the application of the U process both in the context of East Africa, with young people & with people on the digital margins.