Aya Hijazi

Aya Hijazi is an Masters in Public Administration (MPA) candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School.

FXB: What do you see as the biggest overall challenges in Child Protection these days?

Children are not voters and they don’t have a voice. It’s their care takers that have to advocate for them, and more often than not, their caretakers need help themselves, or the ones putting them at risk. Thus, they remain the most vulnerable.

FXB: How do you think academic and scholarly work can inform child protection approaches? Have you seen any good examples of this in the real world?

If it reaches out to activists and communities. Not just to study them, but to help them and learn from them.

FXB: If you work in a specific region, are there region specific challenges you see? How do you hope to see these addressed?

In Egypt, children, especially from Sinai, children are forcefully disappeared and tortured by the government. No one cares. I want the international community to care, and the 9 children whom I know who remain disappeared to return to their families.