Children’s Rights - Eurochild’s achievements in 2025
Annual Report 2025.
In 2025, we:
- carried out 166 main policy and advocacy activities
- participated in 406 meetings and events with key stakeholders
- supported 40 joint initiatives with peers and allies.
In addition, we recorded more than 6,760 policy and advocacy engagements with our members in 2025. These include opportunities created for members to participate in initiatives, raise their visibility, and contribute their expertise to inform and strengthen our work, as well as capacity-building sessions and invitations to speak at events.
Overall, 2025 was a year of strong policy engagement across a wide range of issues affecting children’s rights. Throughout the year, Eurochild translated the evidence and experiences of members on the ground into clear recommendations for the European Union.
Key examples are our contribution and engagement with EU policy-makers regarding the first-ever EU Anti-Poverty Strategy and EU Anti-Racism Strategy. In the latter, we called for breaking the silence on racial discrimination in childhood, ensuring that children are explicitly featured in the text of the strategy. We also brought a children’s rights perspective to the EU Civil Society Strategy and the Intergenerational Fairness Strategy, where many of our recommendations were reflected in the final outcome.
Throughout 2025, Eurochild also continued to build on the evidence gathered through its Flagship Report released in November 2024. We developed country profiles on children in need and produced 12 thematic sub-reports.
Our 2025 Flagship Report, Unequal Childhoods: Rights on paper should be rights in practice, based on contributions from 84 members and contributors across more than 36 countries, provided consolidated, high-quality civil society evidence on children’s rights. The report and its country profiles were disseminated directly to more than 1,000 EU decision-makers, including all Members of the European Parliament, European Commission services, and national Child Guarantee Coordinators. They were also used to inform European Semester exchanges and national policy discussions.
Eurochild also launched a dedicated campaign to counter growing anti-child rights narratives and wider attacks on human rights standards. Through this work, we equipped members with evidence, messaging and advocacy tools to defend children’s rights and democratic civic space at the national and EU level. Eurochild supported members in contexts where children’s rights and child human rights defenders are particularly under threat, due to misinformation, hate speech, foreign agent laws limiting funding, amongst others, including in Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia, and supported active strategic litigation efforts. We also contributed to the EU Enlargement Report, acting as a bridge between organisations on the ground and EU institutions.
Eurochild contributed to a thematic discussion on combating child poverty and social exclusion at the Council of Europe Mid-Term review conference of the Strategy on the rights of the child.
Eurochild highlighted EU priorities for children’s rights at Europe’s largest Youth Welfare Conference in Germany. Thanks to the collaboration with our German member, AGJ (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kinder und Jugendhilfe), Eurochild hosted a session on the EU's Key priorities for children’s rights between 2024 and 2029. In close collaboration with the Malta Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society, Eurochild supported and showcased its good practices during the study visit ‘Advancing and Promoting the Implementation of ECG through ESF+’.
Under the GUIDE project – Supporting Guardians of Unaccompanied Children – Eurochild, together with its member National Network for Children Bulgaria and five partners, developed a practical training manual for guardians, including hands-on tools, exercises, and mappings of key service providers across health, education, social, and mental health sectors in five countries. The project also strengthened national-level support through “Listening Circles,” offering guardians a safe space to share challenges, exchange experiences, and address gaps where government support remains insufficient. From late 2025 through 2026, the project shifted towards policy and advocacy at both national and EU levels, translating field insights into concrete recommendations to strengthen child protection systems across Europe.
