3. Building Coalitions and Developing Leadership

Ending child servitude in Haiti requires nothing less than a broad social movement. And building this movement requires strong leadership at every level of society with strong coalitions of organizations coordinating their activities.

In the past two decades a growing number of local, national, and international organizations have taken an interest in child servitude. Their efforts, though, have often been uncoordinated and carried out in isolation of what others are doing. The result has often been wasted resources, duplicated efforts, and lost opportunities for learning from one another.

The Campaign is working both to nurture the development of leadership committed to ending child servitude and encourage greater collaboration and coordination among groups working to end child servitude.

With support from the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) (an initiative of the UN's International Labor Organization), we organized our first large conference in Port-au-Prince in December, 2000. This conference brought together representatives from 45 different local, national, and international organizations with the goal of discussing our various strategies, learning from each other, and building a network of organizations committed to ending the practice of child servitude in Haiti.

From that conference we nurtured the growth of the Rezo Aba Sistem Restavek (ASR)--Down-with-Child-Servitude Network--which is the largest coalition of organizations committed to eliminating child servitude in Haiti. This network of local, national, and international organizations meets at least once each month to coordinate activities and plans and provide member organizations with a wide range of training and staff-development opportunities.

The ASR Network initially depended heavily on support from the Campaign and leadership from our sister organization in Haiti, the Limye Lavi Foundation. But over time the network has matured, achieved legal recognition, elected leadership from its ranks, and now stands on its own feet with more limited support from the Campaign.

This has freed the Campaign up to focus more attention on building regional extensions of the ASR Network that push the networking further into the countryside and deeper into the grassroots. We are currently giving special attention to groups working in the South-East Department of Haiti (one of ten geographical divisions of Haiti).