Welcome to the online Guide and Toolkit for Supporting Community-led Child Protection. Below you will find a quick tour of this resource and how to get the most from it.
Why we wrote it
A community-led approach is a powerful, sustainable way to protect children from harm. It is based on the idea that when facilitators listen deeply and act with humility, communities can take the lead in making decisions and effecting lasting change.
In the course of our work, many people have asked us questions, including why and how to start adopting this approach. This Guide and Toolkit were created to provide a simple and accessible set of answers.
How we wrote it
Created by the Child Resilience Alliance (formerly the Columbia Group for Children in Adversity), this Guide and Toolkit represent many years of research. In particular, we drew on deep work in Sierra Leone and Kenya, learning from both communities and practitioners there. We also gathered inputs from people around the world who have extensive practical experience in community-led work.
Who it is for?
“Communities are inherently resilient to adversity, left on their own, they will innovate, mobilise and chart out development destinies that work for them”
Patrick O., child protection practitioner in Uganda
The Guide and Toolkit were developed for many different audiences. Whether you are a community-level facilitator, a manager at a large NGO, a funding partner for community projects, or a ministry responsible for child protection, here you will find practical guidance on how to begin doing and supporting community-led work. However, it is important to note that these resources are not a one-stop shop, as the best way to learn to use a community-led approach is through direct experience.
Context is very important in community work. Because all communities are different, this Guide and Toolkit are flexible. The resources offered here provide principles and activities that can be easily adapted to local environments, making them suitable for child protection work anywhere in the world.
What does it contain?
The Guide consists of seven brief, accessible chapters for all those interested in learning more about community-led work. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the rationale and broad principles that underlie a community-led approach, including the need for humility, sharing of power, and dialogue. Chapters 3 to 7 provide practical advice on how to contextualize and adapt a community-led approach in your own area of work.
Each chapter offers engaging questions, examples, practical tips, and pitfalls to avoid. Each is also linked to practical tools from the Toolkit . These include:
- Facilitation Tools: for helping facilitators, program officers, and managers to reflect on how they do their work and strengthen “soft skills” such as humility, deep listening, and empathy.
- Training Tools: for helping facilitators to prepare for community-led work, or for training program officers and managers about the value of community-led approaches.
- Learning Tools: for helping child protection workers to learn about communities in a way that is deeper, richer, and more contextualized than in prepackaged assessments and situation analyses.
- Management Tools: for NGO managers, program officers, funding partners, and facilitators to see concrete examples of planning, action, and monitoring of community-led processes of child protection.
How to use it
How you approach the guide depends on what you want to use it for.
You can start at the beginning and read through the chapters in order, either online or by downloading the whole guide and toolkit.
Or you can begin with the question that most interests you about community-led protection work. This will take you directly to the sections of the guide that are most relevant to you.
- The basics
- What is a community-led approach? Is it just a community-based approach?
- We already do child participation, so how is this new or different?
- Why do we need NGOs if communities themselves can do child protection?
- Common concerns
- Isn't it a problem if communities act without linking to formal protection systems?
- It's nice to make a change in a few communities, but is this approach scalable?
- Won't this approach enable communities to harm children or violate their rights?
- Doesn't a community-led approach romanticize culture and communities?
- Evidence and Impact
- How can we use this approach when donors require logframes, indicators, and deadlines?
- How will we know if a community-led approach has “worked”?
- Doing the work
- How do I actually "do" a community-led approach? What tools can I use?
- What skills do I need for a community-led approach, and where can I learn them?
- Can I see a real example of this approach in action?
- Can this approach be used in emergency settings?