The last decade has seen increased attention to and awareness of children's rights throughout the international system, and yet children are rarely represented during peace processes and are largely overlooked when post-conflict, peace-building agendas are hammered out. The effect is to marginalize persistent problems like the rehabilitation and reintegration of child soldiers, and to overlook valuable opportunities to address widespread systemic problems common to war-torn societies. To what extent is this oversight a function of short-lived donor interest, and what other factors influence the short-term nature of child-conscious programmes as societies transition from war to peace?

Surely the problem does not derive from a lack of normative guidance on child rights and protection. The international community has reached consensus on a wide array of child rights. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history and obliges States to take positive measures to respect and ensure children's rights both in peace and in war. International law strives to regulate the conduct of warring factions and protect children in wartime. International institutions have issued any number of exhortatory calls to action on behalf of war-affected children and youth.

In war's aftermath, States are obliged by article 39 of the Child Rights Convention to take "all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of ... armed conflict". Other issues in need of much greater and more concerted attention in post-conflict settings include the demobilization of child soldiers, the return and reintegration of displaced and refugee children, mine clearance and mine awareness, educational and vocational training capable of replacing the economic incentive of war, and issues of juvenile justice.

Donors, lenders, bilateral aid agencies and development organizations must have children squarely on their radar screens when they undertake to assess the long-term post-conflict, peace-building needs in any given country. But what are the appropriate measures to take?

Before prescribing, we might ask: How much do we know about the needs of war-affected children and what have we learned about the long-term impact of responsive programmes?

For example, what has the international system learned from the experience of demobilizing child combatants in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mozambique, Liberia or Angola? Were the encampment periods in Mozambique and El Salvador crucial to the transition of young combatants to civilian life, and what will the absence of an encampment mean in Liberia or Angola? How much of what is available to children in the post-conflict setting is determined by international or domestic politics specific to a given conflict, country or time period? How much do we know about the lives of Mozambican former child soldiers after the various psychosocial interventions designed to help them reintegrate into the families and communities that were sometimes victims of these same children's barbarous acts? How do young men who have formed their identities during wartime or as combatants react to the stresses of work and family life after their brief exposure to vocational education or training programmes? How resilient are children and on what factors does long-term resiliency depend? What programmes best support a child's ability to make sense of their war experience, or perhaps to cope with a senseless experience?

In spite of many years of empirical experience, child rights advocates, child welfare agencies, international organizations and non-governmental organizations lack sufficient information about what works and why, in terms of post-conflict programming on quality-of-life issues for children. This is due to a number of factors. One might be a lack of funding for longitudinal follow-up on the impact of interventions for children in war. This lack might respond in part to the fact that programme-implementing institutions do not solicit funding for substantive evaluations or impact assessments over the long term. Transition aid is traditionally linked to emergency aid, funds are limited, priorities are constantly shifting and the next crisis, however defined, is always looming. The "programme horizon" in periods of transition to peace is typically six months to two years. Ultimately, it is unclear whether or to what extent the international community's inability to learn lessons from past experiences derives from a lack of adequate methodologies for doing so, insufficient resources, competing priorities, or simple lack of deliberation and determination on the matter.

I would nevertheless submit that it is both feasible and possibly cost-effective in the long-run to address this gap in our knowledge and to improve the protection of children over the long process of peace-building. Donor interest appears to go hand-in-hand with the way a given situation is described by the programme-implementing agency. It is thus reasonable to predict that donors will be forthcoming with the resources required to monitor certain qualitative aspects of children's lives for longer periods during a transition to peace if programmers begin to conceptualize and portray the problems as of a long-term nature.

One way to begin to address the short-lived nature of donor interest in post-conflict programmes is to ensure that children's needs are reflected in all peace agreements and that donor's commit to provide the financial support and technical assistance necessary for responsive programmes during peace processes.

Several key international actors have recently begun to promote and finance more creative and sustained interventions during transition and post-conflict periods. The World Bank's Post-Conflict Unit is in a position to support child-conscious programmes during a critical early transition period and then promote continuity over the long term through the Bank's development-oriented lending. The United Nations Development Programme also has created a programme for countries in special situations, enabling the agency to invest in countries at an earlier transition stage than previously possible. The International Rescue Committee's Children and War Unit and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' Regional Advisers on Refugee Children augment the capacities of those agencies to integrate a child-conscious focus throughout their programming. These efforts need system-wide coordination to ensure continuity and coherence.

Having raised public awareness and having sensitized the international community to the plight of children in war, and given an international system increasingly capable of financing responsive programmes at critical moments in the transition from war to peace, our task now is to instil in the international system a higher level of objective knowledge and technical capacity to respond to the long-term needs of children in post-conflict settings. Child welfare organizations and advocates have the ear of the international community and must now seek to fill the gap between what we know about programming for survival needs and what we know about programming to improve the long-term quality of life for war-affected children.