What Are We Learning About Protecting Children in the Community?

Community-based child protection systems are increasingly important in ensuring children are protected in emergency, transitional, and development contexts worldwide.

For international agencies, they're a favoured approach in cases where local and national government is unable or unwilling to fulfill children’s rights to care and protection.

But, although this approach is widely used and supported by international agencies, there's a lack of robust evidence about the effectiveness, cost, scalability and sustainability of community-based child protection mechanisms.

As well as impeding accountability and making it difficult to define good practice, this lack of systematic evidence also hinders efforts to get essential funding.  

This executive summary:

• describes different types of community-based child protection groups
• 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 wellbeing.