Over the past decade, the field of international child protection in humanitarian and development settings has changed and matured in significant ways. A previous focus on deficits and problems is being eclipsed by a new focus on children’s resilience, and more attention is being paid to improving the evidence base and strengthening wider systems of child protection.
However, significant gaps remain with regard to prevention, local ownership, and sustainability. Still needed are deeper ways of engaging with communities which enable communities to own and lead internally guided processes of sustainable change in local beliefs, practices, and norms that may enable harm to children.
The purpose of this Guide and its companion Toolkit is to offer a sustainable approach that is led by communities rather than by experts or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Community-led approaches can take many forms, but all of them feature community power, dialogue, and decision-making—including by children. Community-led approaches generate high levels of community ownership, enable stronger harm prevention and sustainability, and decrease dependency on NGOs and externally-led child protection initiatives.
However, community-led approaches are neither a silver bullet nor a replacement for more top-down approaches. Ultimately, child protection requires an appropriate mix of top-down and more grassroots-driven, bottom-up approaches. We still have much to learn about how to balance and intermix these complementary approaches.
Community-led approaches cannot be reduced to a recipe, a checklist, or a universal set of steps. Communities vary enormously, and in each context communities need space to develop their own ways of working that fit the context. Accordingly, this Guide offers no recipes. Instead, it sets out a wider approach that supports effective community action in a way that builds on community strengths and resilience, engages many parts of the community, enables the agency and voices of girls and boys, and is consistent with children’s rights.
The Guide was written with multiple audiences in mind: facilitators, NGO and community practitioners, senior NGO managers, and also donors and policy leaders. It consists of seven brief chapters written in an accessible style with a minimum of academic jargon and references. Each chapter offers diverse examples, reflective questions for practitioners, and practical ideas regarding benchmarks, things to do, and things to avoid. To support the application of this approach, each chapter also refers readers to particular tools from the Toolkit which accompanies the Guide.
Part 1 of this Guide focuses on the broad principles that underlie a community-led approach and the need to transform our way of working toward a more humble orientation, featuring greater power-sharing with communities and psychological space for local dialogue and decision-making.
Part 2 develops a highly contextualized, community-led process, the heart of which is slow, inclusive dialogue and collective decision-making which does not reproduce existing community power structures. The Guide emphasizes how outsiders can be valuable facilitators, co-learners, and capacity-builders who enable inclusivity and internal mobilization of people at different levels on behalf of vulnerable children.
The spirit of this Guide and Toolkit is that the journey toward strengthened child protection systems must begin with effective listening and a spirit of humility and co-learning alongside communities.