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A Child by Age, an Adult by Need: When Survival Collides with Child Protection Systems
Posted on: 10th February, 2026 By: Annah Kamusiime & Barbra Odongo 10 min readEmma grew up in rural Uganda, forced to become an adult while still a child to care for his younger brother. To survive, he altered his age, a decision that later excluded him from a global stage where he was meant to speak. His story reveals a painful paradox: the very strategies vulnerable children use to survive can later become barriers to inclusion. As development systems celebrate youth participation, Emma’s experience challenges us to ask whether our safeguarding frameworks are flexible enough to embrace the complex realities of the children they aim to protect.
Introducing Emma: A Child Carrying Adult Responsibility.
As a child burdened with adult responsibilities, Emma faced choices shaped by necessity, and changing his age to that of an adult became one of the few ways available to him to survive and care for himself and his young brother. Emma grew up in a rural community in Eastern Uganda where childhood did not come with guarantees. In his early teens, while still a child himself, he assumed responsibility for his younger brother. With no stable adult care around them, Emma became, in practice, a parent to himself and to his brother.
Emma lived two lives at once, one as a child and another as an adult. By age, he was a child. By responsibility, he was an adult. He missed school to work. For him and his brother to survive, Emma had to work. He carried firewood heavier than his body, missed school to survive, and assumed adult responsibilities long before adulthood arrived. His childhood was shaped less by protection systems than by their absence. Like many children in vulnerable contexts, he learned early that survival often requires navigating gaps left by families, communities, and institutions. This responsibility did not wait for him to grow up. It arrived early and stayed.
Over time, Emma learned that being seen as a child often limited access to opportunities, like having a national identification card, representing himself in the face of injustice, work, and defending himself or his brother, being seen as an adult, even when untrue, made survival possible, Emma changed his name and age to appear older. This was his way of navigating constraints in a system with gaps in protection and as a way to keep going in a space that was unresponsive to vulnerability.
The ACCEL Africa Intervention: A Ray of Hope
Emma’s situation began to change when he became part of the ACCEL Africa project, supported by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and implemented by Nascent Research and Development Organization (Nascent RDO-U) in Uganda. Through the project, Emma accessed life skills and vocational training. He returned to school more consistently. He trained as a mechanic and began earning some income from garage work, reducing the pressure to rely solely on hazardous labour. For the first time in a long while, Emma was not only reacting to immediate needs. He was planning. He was thinking beyond tomorrow.
Through his engagement in a youth Hackathon under the ACCEL project, Emma emerged as a peer advocate against child labour. He spoke from experience, not theory. Other children listened to him because he understood their lives.
This led to his invitation to participate in the 6th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, organized by Global March Against Child Labour in November 2025 on Consultation for Children, Youth, and Survivors. Later, this pointed to the possibility of participating in a global child labour conference in Morocco. For Emma, this was not just about travel. It was recognition. It meant that what he had lived through mattered beyond his village. It was an opportunity to speak for himself and many other children like him.
Unfortunately, When Survival Meets Safeguarding: Two Legitimate Realities Collide.
As preparations progressed, routine documentation reviews began. It was during this process that discrepancies emerged between Emma’s official records and the information held by the project.
The altered name and age, which was made as survival strategy, now presented a challenge. On one side were institutional responsibilities like safeguarding, documentation integrity, and duty of care. On the other, was a young person whose earlier choices had been shaped by exclusion, not opportunity.
The decision was made to withdraw support for Emma’s physical participation in the Morocco conference, with online participation proposed instead. No one acted in bad faith. The decision followed existing rules. Still, for Emma, the moment marked a shift, from being invited to speak, to being reminded of the limits of his inclusion.
Agency, Survival, and a New Form of Marginalization
Emma’s story complicates how we understand children’s agency. Children’s agency is often ambivalent, both constrained and creative, visible and invisible. Emma’s decision to alter his identity sits within this complexity. It was an act of navigation within unequal power structures, not a rejection of rules, but a response to their absence. Child-centered development requires recognizing such agency without romanticizing it and without punishing children for the vulnerabilities our systems aim to address. For instance, his earlier decisions were acts of navigation in a world where being a child offered little protection. Yet those same decisions later limited his participation in spaces designed to amplify children’s voices. Here, agency did not lead to empowerment alone, it also produced a new form of marginalization.
This raises difficult questions: when children adapt to survive, are our systems prepared to meet them where they are? Or do protection frameworks sometimes exclude the very children they aim to safeguard?
What Comes Next for Children Like Emma?
After the conference decision, Emma returned to his everyday life. He continued school. He worked part-time at a garage. He remained responsible, in many ways, for his younger brother and himself. The identity challenges that surfaced did not disappear; they simply fell outside programme timelines.
Emma’s story invites reflection beyond this single case. What happens to children whose lives do not fit neatly into institutional categories of “child” or “adult”? How do we support children whose survival strategies later become barriers?...
This is not a call to abandon rules or safeguarding. It is a call to examine how these systems interact with lived realities, and whether flexibility, follow-up, and accompaniment are possible when children’s lives are complex. Emma is not asking for exceptions. His story is asking for understanding.
Towards a different way of working
Emma will not take the stage in Morocco as initially envisioned. That reality is now clear. What remains open is what his story asks of us. It asks whether our policies are flexible enough to respond to complex childhoods. It asks whether safeguarding can coexist with compassion and creativity. It asks whether development systems are willing to learn when lived experience disrupts neat frameworks. Most importantly, it asks whether we are prepared to walk with children beyond the moments when their stories inspire us, into the quieter, harder work of accompaniment.
Emma is not an exception. He represents many children whose lives do not align neatly with categories of “child” or “adult,” “beneficiary” or “advocate.” If development practice is to remain credible, it must make space for these realities not only in publications and conferences, but in the decisions, we make when the stakes are personal and immediate. As Emma continues his journey, balancing school, work, and leadership in his community, his story remains a mirror held up to the sector itself. The question it leaves us with is not whether rules matter. They do. The question is whether, when reality tests those rules, we are willing to evolve how we apply them.
Moreover, Emma’s story calls us to be reflexive of what children’s participation actually means and for whose benefit it is. Children’s participation in global forums is rightly celebrated. Yet Emma’s experience invites reflection on how participation is designed. For institutions, children’s voices humanize policy debates. For children like Emma, participation carries costs: time away from school, away from his part-time work, emotional investment, and raised expectations. When participation is later constrained or withdrawn, the emotional impact can be devastating. This is not an argument against participation. It is a call to design it more responsibly, with compensation, continuity, safeguarding, and realistic pathways beyond the event itself.
Opinions expressed in 'NRDO Uganda' blog posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
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