Effective training of facilitators is best done by or with people who have first-hand experience in using community-led approaches.

This section makes extensive use of participatory role-plays, with group reflection on the process and how to improve the facilitator’s skills.

A useful approach, however, is to intermix these activities with the reflective activities promoted in Section 1.

Top-down approaches have their value and place in humanitarian and development work on child protection. Yet they also have limits. This role-play enables practitioners and others to understand and explore the limits or problems associated with a top-down, expert-driven approach to child protection.

Most NGOs and child protection workers use and recognize the value of facilitation processes. But child protection workers frequently try to facilitate work in way that manipulates or moves people in a particular direction. The purpose of this role-play is to stimulate awareness and discussion of the limits of manipulative, directive approaches to facilitation, know as “facipulation”.

Read a useful list summarizing the key differences between top-down and bottom-up (community-led) approaches.

To take a community-led approach means first understanding what a “community” is. Communities exhibit enormous variety and differences that can have significant implications for how to engage with them and for the development of community-driven action. The purpose of this gallery walk and discussion is to help participants to think in nuanced, critical ways about what is a community and how communities vary.

In helping to prepare facilitators for their work, it can be useful to think in practical terms about things that facilitators should do, and things they should not. This tool sets out a fun way of developing and discussing such Dos and Don’ts, and provides a sample list from work in countries such as Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Uganda.

The best way to learn to ask appropriate, well-timed probing questions is to practice with an observer who can provide useful feedback for improvement. This tool provides a scenario and role-play for some useful practice.

This role-play helps to stimulate awareness of the problems that non-inclusive approaches to community decision-making can create. It also enables constructive thinking about how to build a more inclusive process.

This role-play gives facilitators experience in helping community members take stock of how large community meetings are not fully inclusive and inviting collective problem-solving about how to overcome those limits.

To support communities in making inclusive decisions about child protection, facilitators live in the communities and spend extensive time building trust, listening, learning, asking questions, observing, and accompanying. But as the scenarios in this tool show, this closeness needs to be balanced with an independent role, and can create conflicts and ethical challenges.

Community and child protection workers often speak of “community ownership”, but this can mean many different things. It is also important to identify things that support or limit community ownership. This gallery walk and discussion helps participants to conceptualize community ownership and reflect on what enables it and what impedes it. Download the PDF here.

See a sample of how you could structure a workshop to prepare facilitators for enabling and supporting community-led processes of child protection.