Brazil is not exactly fertile ground for children’s rights. It’s a country where most people, particularly children, are struggling just to get by. There are many alarming statistics. Consider, for example, this one: almost 40 percent of five-year-olds live with less than $61 per year (compared with 25% in the general population). Also, Brazilians are relatively new to democracy, which was established in 1988 when the current Federal Constitution was enacted.

Yet there appears to be a strong desire to improve the lot of Brazilian children. In the mid-1980s a child rights movement began to address the problem of children hustling on the streets.

By 1988 the Brazilian Child and Adolescent Rights Act (ECA, Estatuto da Crianca e do Adolescente.) ECA had been enacted stating that children have the right to “life, health, nutrition, education, leisure, job training, be respected, freedom, live with a family and in a community, not being neglected, discriminated against, exploited, or a victim of violence, cruelty or oppression”.

Twenty years later, Brazil seems quite far from the ideals established in ECA. Indeed, many of the 5,000-plus municipalities still lack active councils which are supposed to make local policies, dole out funds, and ensure that children suffering from abuse, inadequate healthcare, school problems, and the like get the help they need.

Moreover, there’s no way to know if the active councils are having any impact on children’s lives. No large-scale evaluation is in the works. Brazil appears to lack not only the resources but also the political will to make this happen.

On the one hand detractors of ECA say there is no evidence that the policy has helped or even not hurt children. On the other hand, some are suspicious that any evaluation that might be implemented will be tainted by politics – just an effort to make a case for or against ECA.

Against this background, a team of US and Brazilian researchers (including Irene Rizzini of Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro and Felton J. Earls of Harvard University) have called for a real evaluation of ECA – despite the odds against it. They maintain that the information that such an evaluation could provide would not only help to preserve and improve ECA, but also inform efforts like it in other developing nations around the world.

• Summary of “The Evolution of Child Rights Councils in Brazil” by Cristiane S. Duarte, Irene Rizzini, Christina W. Hoven, Mary Carlson, and Felton J. Earls in International Journal of Children's Rights, April 2007, Volume 15, Issue 2, pp.269-282.