This series draws on the webinar “Seen, Counted and Protected” convened by Family for Every Child as part of the Children on the Move 2026 campaign. Six civil society organisations working across Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, Greece, the UK, and Colombia came together to share what identity rights look like in practice for children on the move. Each post in this series focuses on one organisation and one dimension of the problem.
When an unaccompanied child arrives in Greece, they arrive with no adult with formal responsibility for them; they may not have documents; they may not speak Greek or English. And one of the first questions the system asks is: how old are you? That question matters more than it might seem.
A child’s age determines which shelter they are placed in, whether they can access certain forms of legal protection, what kind of schooling they can attend, and what healthcare they are entitled to. Age is, in a bureaucratic sense, foundational to a child’s identity. And when a child arrives without documentation, their age is simply not known.
METAdrasi has been working on this problem in Greece since 2014, developing and running a guardianship programme for unaccompanied minors that became national law in 2024. Since the programme began, 6,150 children have been supported through it. They have come from Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Why children give the wrong age
Olga Leventis, a practitioner with METAdrasi who has been a guardian since the programme’s beginning, described something that rarely gets discussed in policy documents: children who arrive and declare an age that is not their actual age. This happens in both directions. Older teenagers sometimes say they are younger, believing that being classified as a younger child will bring more protection or better placements. Younger children sometimes claim to be older, perhaps to avoid certain systems or placements they have been warned about. Sometimes the declaration is influenced by smugglers or by what a young person has been told to say on arrival.
The result is that a child enters the system under the wrong identity. Every subsequent decision is made on that basis. Schooling, shelter, legal proceedings: all of it flows from an age that is not accurate.
One boy’s experience
Olga described the case of a boy who arrived and declared a much younger age than his actual fourteen years. The error was not immediately caught. He was placed in a shelter for younger children and not enrolled in school, because his declared age placed him outside the relevant school year group. Months passed before the process to verify his actual age began. Through the work of his guardian, interpretation services, and legal assistance, a formal age determination was eventually made. He was an adolescent, not a young child. He moved to an appropriate shelter, and was enrolled in school. Now, he is in the process of reunification with his biological sister in Germany.
During those months in between, he was, as Olga put it, invisible. Not invisible in the sense of being unknown, he was in the system, in a shelter, being seen by staff. But invisible in the sense that the identity on his file did not correspond to who he actually was. His rights were being fulfilled for a child who did not exist.
What guardianship provides
The guardianship model METAdrasi developed and introduced for the first time in Greece, and which the country has now adopted nationally gives each unaccompanied child a trained adult who is formally responsible for their wellbeing and whose role is explicitly to safeguard their rights.
Guardianship includes navigating the age determination process when it is needed, and advocating within health, education, and legal systems, as well as building the kind of relationship in which a child can express their views about their own future, rather than having decisions made around them. The guardian is not a caseworker moving between files. They are a consistent, trusted person for a child who, in most cases, has no one else in that role.
The reduction in risks of exploitation, neglect, and abuse that comes with guardianship is documented. It is harder to quantify what it means to a child to have someone whose job is specifically to see them clearly and act in their interest.
The broader point
The lesson from METAdrasi’s work is not only about age determination. It is about what happens when a child passes through a system without anyone whose responsibility is to see them as an individual. Systems see data. Guardians see children.
In Greece, as across Europe, unaccompanied minors are among the most vulnerable people in any country. Their identity, in every sense, is something they are frequently asked to prove, negotiate, or wait for others to determine. METAdrasi’s contribution is to insist that while that process unfolds, each child should have someone standing alongside them.
This is part 1 of a six-part series.
Family for Every Child’s Children on the Move 2026 campaign runs from 15 to 21 June. Join the conversation on the Changemakers platform.
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