Children and their families must be the owners of their own development. Children have a right to participate fully in their development and therefore children who are capable of forming their own views should have the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting them and their world. Child participation helps build citizenship and democracy, builds capacity, develops leadership and empowers and develops children’s potential by involving them in development activity. Plan recognises that participatory processes are time-consuming but that the time investment pays dividends in development long-term. Plan has positive experiences of how the participation of children can be effective in getting commitments from local and national governments to improve services to those communities. Therefore, Plan prioritizes its work on:

• Building children’s organisations that help develop the child’s capacity and create opportunities to participate in community development.
  
  
• Building community and Panchayat capacity to listen and address the concerns of children, in particular those from poor and marginalised families.
  
  
• Facilitating children to better understand community governance and develop mechanisms of social audit thus enforcing the accountability of duty bearers.