Taking a modified approach in protracted crises
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach in crisis settings, it is often possible to use community-led approaches in protracted crises. The general guidelines that follow can be useful in this respect.
One useful way to begin is to help the community to reflect on significant harms to children. In a relatively stable setting in a protracted crisis—such as an urban community with long-term refugees—the facilitator would live in or near the community, participating in daily activities and talking with many different people, including children, about what they see as the most significant harms to children.
By asking non-directive, open-ended questions such as, 'What are the most significant harms to children here?' in both group and individual discussions, the facilitator would invite dialogue that brings forth different points of view. Noting that there are no right or wrong answers, the facilitator would help local people see and explore divergent viewpoints in a constructive manner.
The facilitator would work in a highly inclusive manner, helping the community to consider how they could include all kinds of different people—including girls and boys—in the discussions and to develop appropriate means of including everyone. This inclusive approach is important for equity and for promoting the dignity and agency of each individual. It also heightens the collective attention to children’s issues and avoids having local leaders or power elites make the key decisions. Any action on behalf of children will ultimately be more sustainable if a broad range of people engage with or support it.
In the discussions, the facilitator should not follow a strict timetable but work according to “community time,” recognizing that each community is different and that the process of inclusive dialogue and collective reflection is important. Particular harms to children will start to emerge as most important, often because of their severity or pervasiveness. The discussions may also illuminate how various harms interact and what their root causes are, and this can also identify particular harms as important to address.
However, it is the community, not the facilitator or the NGO, who decides which harm or harms to children to address, as this decision is the foundation for collective ownership and community-led action. It may be unrealistic to aim for universal agreement, but it is often possible for people to achieve a consensus that reflects the views and wishes of different groups within the community. If broad agreement is not possible at this stage, the facilitator might switch to a smaller group approach such as that outlined below.
Next, the facilitator would invite dialogue on what steps the community could take to address the selected harm(s) to children. As before, the emphasis is on enabling divergent views to be expressed, with constructive, critical reflection on the merits and drawbacks of each suggested step. Experience indicates that suggested steps which are not in the best interests of the child tend not to garner widespread agreement and, hence, do not rise to the top of the discussions.
If children's voices in the discussions remain prominent—and they should—then children themselves frequently propose steps that, based on their lived experiences, are likely to be effective in addressing the harm(s). Equally important is that children themselves frequently volunteer to help address the selected issues. Having awakened children's agency, this process can help to channel children's creativity and problem-solving abilities into the quest for community-led solutions. In the process, children become actors and leaders rather than beneficiaries, and they become seen as people who help the community to achieve its goals.
The community-led planning discussions would continue until the community has agreed on the steps it will take and which community members will take them. Sometimes, the community may decide that it will need to learn about particular topics or develop particular capacities in order to take effective action. The community may also decide that it needs the support of or collaboration with relevant government actors such as district- or province-level social workers, health workers, or police. The NGO could help with both capacity building and with brokering formal connections between the community and other stakeholders.
Having decided the steps to be taken to address the harm(s) to children, the community takes the steps it had planned, with different groups potentially playing valuable roles.
For example, if the harm to be addressed is early sex, children might conduct street dramas followed by community discussions that help everyone understand the harm caused to children by early sex and the value of keeping children in school. If the plan calls for more supervised activities for children after school, parents might conduct discussions among themselves about which activities seem to be most helpful, and how to adjust to any challenges that have arisen.
Over time, the community members themselves step back, reflect on how well the community action is succeeding, and what, if anything, needs to be changed. Where changes are needed, it is the community who decides which adjustments to make.
As the community action continues, the facilitator steps back even further, decreasing any remaining dependency on outside actors. Because the community action is owned and managed by the community people, who take responsibility for it and see its value, their action tends to be sustainable.
In settings that are less stable, it may be difficult or impossible to take a full community approach such as that described above. However, it might be possible to identify particular groups who are eager to support vulnerable children through action that is locally owned and managed.
For example, girls and/or a women's group might be very concerned over girls' sexual harassment by men en route to school. Using a process of dialogue and exploration of different options, the facilitator could help the group to develop an action plan to reduce the problem. This might include campaigns to call attention to the harm caused by sexual harassment, or teenage boys walking with girls to school, deterring harassments and assaults.
Although such actions are not full community steps, they can nonetheless be useful in preventing harms to children. Also, once local people see that the actions are supporting children's well-being, more people frequently offer to pitch in and help the process. In this manner, what begins as a relatively small group initiative may expand over time to engage community members on a wider basis.
As this example suggests, bottom-up approaches are quite flexible, and NGOs can help to facilitate them best by adapting to the local context and building upon the agency of the community actors who are prepared to engage.
