Universities should take up the responsibility to do contextual research on social sciences, especially on the child survival, development, protection and participation in various parts of State to provide required recommendations to the government, said Sunil Kumar, Vice-Chairman, State Planning Commission, Chhattisgarh, while chairing the concluding session of the national consultation on ‘innovating for children’ held here on Friday.
Chief of Field Services, UNICEF India, Foroogh Foyouzat opined that innovation is not about technology alone, in fact it is about creative thinking, solution finding approach and finally problem solving.
The representations in the consultation demonstrated how we can think out of the box, while talking about child issues and addressing them. Factors such as inequity, gender-based challenges and limited or no access to services should be the top priorities while redressing the problems surrounding child welfare, he said.
Summarising the discussions held during the four sessions of the national consultation, Deputy Representative UNICEF India, Henriette Ahrens underlined the need of ‘right-based approach’ over ‘need-based approach’, considering the child as centre of the schemes, seeing them as a full human being.
The consultation had presentations and revelations from a total of 12 States of the country, throwing light on the innovations already made to facilitate the children of the society.
On the second day of the two-day national consultation on ‘Innovating for Children’ organised by Chhattisgarh State Planning Commission, in partnership with UNICEF and Department of Women and Child Development, fourth session of the consultation was held on the topic ‘Child Participation’ and sub-theme of the session was ‘Create an enabling environment and opportunities to actively involve children in all matters concerning them’.
In this session on Child Participation, innovators namely R Prasanna, Commissioner Health Services, Government of Chhattisgarh, OP Choudhary, Collector and District Magistrate Raipur, Rajesh Singh, Director ICPS, Government of Jharkhand, Ravi Dhanuka, Prime Minter’s Rural Development Fellow and Tushar Rane from UNICEF, gave presentation covering the sub-themes such as partnership for innovations in child-centric policies, planning, institutional framework, creating psycho-social environment for innovation, community-based innovations, and leveraging the use of technology for addressing issues related to well-being of children.