The Social Value Created By Child Protectors

Social Value International members, Citizens 4 Change use the wisdom of the crowd to protect East African children from violence. The below blog outlines how Social Value International Members can help Citizens for Change understand the social value created by citizens who protect children:

Citizens 4 Change are now piloting an innovation that will protect 136,000 children from harm by the end of 2023. We do this by catalysing, tapping into, & learning from the collective intelligence of a crowd of child protectors in East Africa.

We are seeking to understand the social value created by citizens who protect children. Tell us about the social value you plan to create in 2021.

A new argument for investing in the next generation

The positive impact from investing in young people far outweigh the costs. That’s not just my opinion — it’s a scientific fact.

And at the same time, policy-makers and planners are obliged by the universal human rights to protect children’s rights to survival, protection, development and to participation.

However, neither science-based nor human rights arguments have led to the necessary investments in children and young people; investments that are truly needed to unleash their potential and foster inclusive development.

So this is the conundrum: if science and human rights are insufficient arguments for investing more in young people, is there an alternative that would help us make the case more convincingly for senior leaders in government?

The social value argument

Social value is used to measure the relative importance people place on the changes — for example increased confidence, new skills, safer communities —  they experience in their lives.

Derived from this, the social return on investment approach applies a set of principles within a framework to measure and account for social value. The approach measures change in ways that are relevant to the people who contribute to them, and tells the story of how change is created by measuring social, economic, or environmental outcomes and using monetary values to account for them. This enables a ratio of benefits to costs to be calculated.

Read more about what Kate learnt as she calculated the social return from investing in a Tanzanian youth empowerment programme. 

Learning about the social value you create as child protectors. 

We are now conducting a forecast to calculate the social value that will be crated by child protectors. Please do spend 10 minutes completing this survey to help us better understand how you protect children and how these impacts endure. 

Are you a public servant who is trying to protect children from harm? We are conducting this inquiry to understand how together we can navigate the complexity of preventing and responding to violence against children in East Africa.  We will use these findings to design activities and projects that support public servants to better protect children and to find solidarity and connection with others who are trying to keep children safe from harm.