The project Mario aims at improving the level of protection of C/SEE migrant children who are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and/or trafficking. The project seeks – through transnational outreach research, advocacy, trainings and direct support to professionals and empowerment of C/SEE at-risk migrant children – to find multilateral solutions to the problems that children face prior, during or after migration and that require coordinated protection schemes for individual children. Services which protect at-risk migrant children in Central and South Eastern Europe from abuse, exploitation or other violations of their rights were provided with a strong emphasis put on child participation. Activities at national and regional levels, coupling field work with a strong research component aim at fostering inter-institutional and transnational collaboration while promoting evidence-based and European solutions to the unsafe migration of C/SEE children.

- Children on the move – migrant children and children with a migration background coming from Central and South Eastern Europe (C/SEE) and who were at risk or were victims of abuse, exploitation and/ or trafficking.
- Professionals that are working with cases of abuse, exploitation and/ or trafficking of children in Europe.
- National, regional and European authorities, decision and policy makers.
- Various main actors of the field of child protection that benefited from the information sharing systems and the mapping of existing activities and capacities.

Reinforcing capacities: At national level, project partners provided support to state and non-state actors in order to enable national child protection systems to meet the needs and wants of C/SEE migrant children. A series of training took place which allowed at least 600 professionals to improve their capacity and confidence to manage the cases of C/SEE at-risk migrant children. Training needs have been and will continue to be jointly assessed by the Mario project partners and the children that benefit from the services provided by authorities.

Child participation: Following the first phase of the project Mario, partners took stock of the need to better include children’s views into all components of the project, from inception to the monitoring and evaluation of its impact. Child consultation boards, mainly composed of C/SEE migrant children or at risk of unsafe migration, have therefore been set up in 5 countries in order to regularly gather their views on their own situation and what could be done to improve it. The boards had monthly meetings and shared their views on the services they receive which will allow project partners to adjust their activities at national level. Moreover, C/SEE migrant children also became peer researchers at the occasion of national and transnational researches and offered their own interpretation of the research findings. Finally, children taking part in the boards or other children at risk of unsafe migration decided to implement their own advocacy actions and advocated for a better protection of their rights towards States authorities.

Direct support for the most vulnerable children: Mario partners are keen to ensure that children who have been identified during (and as a result of) the implementation of its activities – or who participated in them – access services that improve their well-being whenever that is needed. Mario partners have therefore provided a series of services either directly when children were found in institutions or in partnership with authorities when children were outside a protective environment to ensure the sound management of their individual case. It is anticipated that at least 700 C/SEE migrant children or at-risk of unsafe migration have seen their well being improved thanks to the direct intervention of Mario partners.

Advocating for the rights of C/SEE migrant children: In 6 countries as well as across Europe, partners conducted Situational Analyses using a common methodology assessing the capacities of the national Child Protection Systems to ensure the protection of C/SEE migrant children. Each Situational Analysis constitutes a baseline against which the project impact will be assessed but was first and foremost been used as an advocacy tool to improve the situation of C/SEE migrant children. Each year, events at national level allowed project partners and children themselves to raise the awareness of authorities on the protection challenges that children and families face in the field and advocate for an improvement of procedures and practice in the management of their case. The project Mario also strived to reinforce civil society partnerships as well as collaboration with authorities at both national and transnational levels. To that end, national coalition of child protection NGOs was established and/or reinforced in Kosovo and Albania while in Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, group of experts allowed both civil society and government representatives to pool their expertise so as to address national capacity and procedural gaps.

Transnational actions: Four transnational outreach researches have been conducted in Greece, Italy, FYROM and The Netherlands to document the situation of Albanian, Bulgarian, Kosovo and Romanian children in street situation in targeted cities within those countries. The researches allowed Mario partners to identify migration patterns and the vulnerability factors that subsequently put C/SEE migrant children at risk. Thanks to the Mario research methodology which combines street work with thorough empirical analysis, C/SEE migrant children offered their views that have been documented and analysed, to offer a sound policy making basis to authorities that have been so far unable to protect them. Based on the transnational researches’ findings, countries of origin, transit and destination’s authorities linked up to explore potential joint actions so as to ensure a better protection of identified children. At the occasion of these meetings, collaboration protocols were designed to offer C/SEE migrant children protective frameworks in line with their best interest along their migration paths.

Joint advocacy actions: At transnational level, all members of the partnership have designed and jointly implemented a common advocacy action plan that addressed State authorities’ failure to find multilateral solutions to the situation of C/SEE migrant children that concern virtually all countries of the European continent. To that end, the Mario network of NGOs in C/SEE implemented joint regional advocacy actions underlining the common challenges that all European countries face when facing C/SEE migrant children cases and developed a multi lateral protection framework that has been closely designed with European countries’ relevant Ministries.

Hundreds of children on the move, as well as their families, were supported by members of the network to get access to education, health and to fulfill their right to be protected through their official registration, putting an end to their administrative invisibility which prevented some of them to get access to any public service.

Organising a series of child consultation boards in the partener countries.

A series of Situational Analyses on the situation of children on the move (based on interviews with the subjects), conducted in the partener countries and lobby for the implementation of their practical recommendations for improvement.

EU-level advocacy for children on the move, by putting the issue of European migrant children on the agenda of the European Union and its Member States.

Organising a series of workshops in the partener countries on various topics such as: Children on the move and child protection systems in Central and South East Europe; Migration of children within Europe, etc.

Trainings for professionals who come across cases of abuse, exploitation and/ or trafficking of children in Europe or who could bring about positive changes in the lives of those children.

The project was implemented in 2 phases: 2009 – 2012 and 2013 – 2015. At the moment only the evaluation for the first phase was published.

Child trafficking and exploitation has been a prevalent phenomenon in Central and South Eastern Europe (C/SEE). In 2009, funded by the Oak Foundation, project Mario started in response to this phenomenon with an aim to better protect children on the move through the reinforcement of the capacities of national, regional and European authorities, decision and policy makers. Implemented in Albania, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Poland, in partnership with Terre des hommes (Tdh), Save the Children Albania Programme, ECPAT in The Netherlands and in Bulgaria as well as Nobody’s Children Foundation in Poland, Mario project ran its course until the end of April, 2012, accomplishing most objectives on the way.

The ultimate goal of project Mario was to ensure the long standing provision of adequate services that meet the needs and wants of children on the move in Europe, at each stage of their migration path. 

Mario’s first objective to improve the capacities of stakeholders and services delivered to children was over passed with a total of 1782 persons trained in the course of the project, across all 4 countries.
In Albania taken alone, 11 multi-stakeholders trainings were organized with a total of 372 participants. These trainings aimed to address child protection issues at both institutional and operational levels while combining theoretical and practical skills in order to improve case management capacity and responses to deliver quality child protection services within the constraints of the local context, including the limited resources and available services. In Albania, Mario promoted protection standards and rights of children at risk and/or victims of exploitation/ trafficking at national and regional levels through the support provided to the Coalition “United for Child Care and Protection” - BKTF - and by institutionalizing the role of the Child Protection Units with the passing of the 2010 Law on the “Protection of the Rights of the Child”. 
At transnational level, the project Mario organized two awareness raising events in 2011 in the European Parliament and at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Human Dimension Implementation Meeting. Supported by the highest political instances of international organizations such as the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Trafficking and its OSCE counterpart, as well as by several Members of the European Parliament and with the participation of the newly appointed EU Anti Trafficking Coordinator, the meetings aimed at raising the awareness of European Institutions, OSCE participating states and other stakeholders on the lack of protection afforded to children on the move being found in other countries than theirs. In all countries, through monitoring visits, steering committee meetings, mid-term evaluations, institutional learning exercises, exchange visits etc, Mario facilitated the development of information sharing systems among main actors of the field of child protection and the mapping of existing activities and capacities. These developments now also provide better mutual understanding among partners of the methods, materials and models of actions needed or available to tackle issues of unsafe movement of children, and more spontaneous exchange of expertise and good practices among professionals and their extended networks. 

Furthermore, to ensure that effective responses were provided to changing trends of child exploitation and trafficking, in 2010 Albania and Kosovo collaborated on a transnational street observation action with an aim to collect and analyze information on the cross-border movement of Albanian children from one country to the other and to identify patterns and trends of their movement so to also better understand their modes of recruitment and exploitation. This one-month long street observation action resulted in the identification of 91 cases of Albanian children in vulnerable situations in Kosovo. Right after identification, their situation and vulnerability were analyzed, an assessment of the available services was performed and recommendations for action were put forward. As a direct outcome of the evidences brought forward by the observation action and to the several efforts made to ensure the protection of children on the move in Europe, Mario with the OSCE facilitated the meeting between Albania and Kosovo on “Enhancing cross-border cooperation on anti-trafficking issues”, held on October 14th 2011. This meeting led to the adoption by both governments of a “Additional Protocol to Intensify Cooperation in Combating Trafficking in Human Beings Across Borders and on the Enhanced Identification, Notification, Referral and Assisted Return of Victims and Suspected Victims of Trafficking, including children” which entered into force on June 12th, 2012. 

Finally, the work of Mario was capitalized through a series of Situational Analyses developed in all 4 countries, focusing on issues like:
- Prostitution-related crimes and Child Trafficking in Poland;
- Situational Analysis of the Action Against Sexual Exploitation of Children in Bulgaria;
- Situational Analysis of the Child Protection System in Albania;
- Summary of Law that Protect Children’s Rights in the Republic of Kosovo;
- Situation Analysis on the situation of foreign unaccompanied minors that do not seek asylum and others.
These reports provided insightful and comprehensive information on the situation of children in Europe as well as on various preventative programmes focusing on topics such as commercial sexual exploitation, child trafficking, unsafe migration of children, etc. Having offered a unique expertise to the service of national and European authorities to address child protection concerns in C/SEE, efforts will continue in order to secure funding and support for the return and continuation of the project Mario.

The project is founded by Terre des Hommes and co-funded by the European Union’s Daphne III Program as well as the Oak Foundation.