International Child Safeguarding through ICT

Three speakers from the Child Rights NGO Terre des Hommes will talk about how they use innovative ICT to combat child protection issues such as child labour, online child sexual exploitation and exploitation of migrant children. Projects to be presented: ChildHub, Sweetie, SaVa and SAP.

ChildHub: Platform for Child Protection
Speaker: Thierry Agagliate, Head of the Disruptive Innovation Unit, Terre des Hommes Switzerland

The ChildHub introduces the use of information technology to facilitate a community of practice in child protection by bringing together more than 8,000 professionals from academia, public institutions and civil society. Moreover, we’ll show how an online platform can help develop capacity, enrich practices and create a chain of actors more motivated and better skilled to prevent and respond to different forms of violence against children.

Digital tools for Child Labour
Speaker: Peggy Herrmann Ljubicic, Head Child Labor Sector, Terre des Hommes Switzerland

Child Labour Monitoring [SAP]
In practice Child Labour Monitoring (CLM, in French SAP) involves the identification, referral, protection and prevention of children affected by or at risk of child labour through the development of a coordinated multi-sector monitoring and referral process, aiming to cover all children living in a given geographical area. Its principal activities include regularly repeated direct observations to identify child labourers and to determine risks to which they are exposed, referral of these children to services, verification that they have been removed and tracking them afterwards to ensure that they have satisfactory alternatives.

SaVa project (Safe Savings)
The aim of the SaVa project (Safe Savings) is to protect children and young migrants living in street situations. This pilot project will, for one year, support 150 children in street situations in Lomé, Togo. The project aims to address the needs of street working children in Lomé, who reported being subject to frequent robbery and violence during a research connected with the CORAL project of the Migration programme. This study showed that one of the problems of insecurity these youngsters have is the stealing and misappropriation of the money earned by their small jobs. SaVa aims to improve the security, independence and financial ability of the children and young migrants living in a street situation and working in the Grand Market in Lomé, Togo, and its outskirts.  This will allow the children to keep their savings safe by way of the banking application ‘Ecobank Mobile’. 

Sweetie 2.0: Against Online Sexual Exploitation of Children
Speaker: Project officer Sweetie, Terre des Hommes Netherlands

Using the fictional character Sweetie, Terre des Hommes has raised uncovered perpetrators of online child sexual exploitation (OCSE) and raised awareness of this issue. In 2013, in order to put OCSE on the worldwide map, four Terre des Hommes researchers chatted online for two months. The number was so shocking. They managed to identify 1,000 online predators who were looking for children to sexually exploit. Then, Terre des Hommes decided to automate the process and deploy AI technology. Since 2016 is been developing and deploying a 12-year-old virtual Philippine girl to scare off potential predators online as well as raising awareness for OCSE.