Child Labour: Action Research Innovation in South and South Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) - Implementation phase)

Our aim is to co-develop, with stakeholders, innovative and context-appropriate ways to increase options for children to avoid engagement in hazardous exploitative labour. The primary beneficiaries will be children in modern slavery and the worst forms of child labour and those who are vulnerable to being drawn into it. The families of these children will benefit from greater resilience to shocks, better options for their children’s safe and healthy future and less intra-family stress and conflict. Businesses will benefit from practical solutions to child-labour free supply chains. Policy makers, NGOs, and researchers will benefit from a knowledge of what works. Action-Research for innovation: We will generate activities and interventions through a large scale action research process. Interventions will range from small scale solutions to local problems, behaviour change initiatives, and large scale pilots. Action research is a programming modality which combines evidence gathering and learning from action. It is designed to enable diverse groups to meet over a period of time to consider evidence and generate theories of change about interventions; plan and programme innovative solutions; test the solutions in real time, and then evaluate them. In this way action research groups act as engines of new innovation.