What Are We Learning About Protecting Children in the Community?

This Executive Summary of an interagency review of evidence on community-based child protection mechanisms discusses findings and recommendations on the support and development of sustainable and effective community-based child protection groups. The review was done by the inter-agency Reference Group representing the Displaced Children and Orphans Fund of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision, the Oak Foundation, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and Save the Children.

Drawing on findings from 60 countries and 160 documents, this executive summary:

• describes different types of community-based child protection groups and identifies common factors that appear to make groups effective (including community ownership, building on existing resources, children’s participation, links between formal and non-formal systems, and balancing power across groups)
  
• looks at examples of scaling up, and ensuring the sustainability both of groups and of positive outcomes for children
  
• sets out six key challenges to maximising the effectiveness of groups
  
• puts forward recommendations to practitioners and donors on how to strengthen community support for children’s protection and well-being.

As stated here, six challenges that need to be addressed effectively in order to maximise the contributions of community-based child protection groups include:

1. Strengthen the evidence by regularly conducting systematic, ethically appropriate evaluations of the work of these groups.
   
2. Enable community-based child protection groups to fulfill appropriate roles and responsibilities - through role definition, understanding of relationship with the larger child protection network, training, and attention to children's roles.
   
3. Produce sustainable, positive outcomes in regard to a broad spectrum of issues by addressing longer-term results on a wider array of issues.
   
4. Build participation to enable genuine dialogue and critical reflection on difficult issues; listen to and learn from communities.
   
5. Facilitate community ownership of child protection groups, even during emergencies, including testing of ways to progressively hand over responsibility and decision-making authority to the community.
   
6. Change donor and agency practices in regard to the amount, structure, and orientation of funding for child protection groups.
   

Recommendations include the following:

Practitioners should:

• prioritise systematic programme evaluation and programme learning
  
• develop and widely disseminate user-friendly, child-focused tools that facilitate systematic evaluation
  
• conduct all work on community-based child protection groups in a manner that supports the strengthening of national child protection systems
  
• use a dialogue-oriented, culturally sensitive approach to facilitate and support the work of community-based child protection groups
  
• plan for and take steps to promote sustainability, helping to build durable national systems of child protection
  
• develop improved systems of training and capacity-building, including follow-up support and ongoing supervision
  
• promote genuine child participation
• manage effectively issues of power, diversity, and tolerance
  
• fill the identified programme gaps on gender-based violence (GBV), family violence, protection of young children, and provision of psychosocial support
  
• embed child protection supports within wider community development processes
  
• place greater emphasis on doing no harm, avoiding problems such as the creation of parallel systems and excessive targeting of specific groups of at-risk children.
  

Donors should:

• require and fund systematic, robust evaluation of their programmes that involve community-based child protection groups
• support longer-term funding that will enable the development of community-owned child protection groups
  
• avoid the use of stigmatising labels such as ‘OVC’ (orphans and vulnerable children)
  
• avoid excessive targeting of particular categories of at-risk children
  
• avoid the infusion of large sums of money into a community, particularly at an early stage before a sense of local ownership has developed.