Strategic Brief | Prioritising Protection of Children in a Changing Humanitarian Landscape

This Strategic Brief outlines how the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (the Alliance) will support the sector in mitigating the impact of reduced resources and structural shifts in the humanitarian system. It focusses on sustaining the ability of humanitarian actors to deliver quality child protection programming. Find the Executive Summary to give an overview of the Strategic Brief. 

Goal: Ensure the continuity of critical child protection prevention and response interventions in humanitarian settings, while adapting to funding shortfalls and changes to the humanitarian architecture.

Unifying Vision: The priorities outlined below, are meant to ensure and advocate for the continued prioritisation of children and their protection within the future of humanitarian action. This entails adaptability of programme implementation approaches to the current reality, while ensuring that children still receive the protection they need and deserve according to humanitarian principles and minimum standards. Therefore, the priorities outlined below should not be seen in isolation, but rather as components of a whole that would deliver on this vision.

Strategic Priorities: 

• Priority 1: Lead and support evidence-informed advocacy efforts that place children and their protection at the centre of humanitarian action
  • P1. Objective 1: Protection of children is prioritised by key agencies, Alliance members, donors, governments, and humanitarian leadership
  • P1. Objective 2: Existing evidence on the outcomes and impact of child protection services is synthesised to support advocacy efforts
• Priority 2: Provide technical leadership for quality programming in line with the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (CPMS)
  • P2. Objective 1: Quality child protection-focussed technical products relevant to the emerging humanitarian landscape are available and meet the needs of diverse practitioners
  • P2. Objective 2: Practitioners have strengthened Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (CPHA) learning and development opportunities
  • P2. Objective 3: Diverse practitioners inform, contribute to and have access to high-quality technical support that reflects and reinforces the CPMS and responds to country-level technical needs
• Priority 3: Alliance members have opportunities to collectively reflect, innovate, and act on emerging challenges to the protection of children in humanitarian crises in light of the current funding crisis
  • P3. Objective 1: Promote meaningful investments in child protection systems, including national and local actors, to enable continuity of high-quality child protection in the evolving humanitarian landscape
  • P3. Objective 2: Children and their protection remain central in technical and strategic discussions shaping humanitarian reform and within cross-sectoral ways of working

The accompanying Evidence to Advocacy Research Agenda delivers on a core commitment of the Alliance’s 2025–2026 Strategic Brief: To generate the evidence needed to secure sustained investment in child protection in humanitarian action. As needs rise and funding declines, the sector must demonstrate not only its impact, but also its economic value and centrality to effective response.

Developed by the Assessment, Measurement and Evidence Working Group in partnership with the Advocacy Working Group, the agenda is focused, time-bound, and advocacy-driven. It aims to show the cost of failing to protect children, the return on investing in core interventions, the added value of child protection to other sectors, and the role of workforce capacity as essential humanitarian infrastructure.

Each research stream is designed to produce actionable, high-impact outputs that feed directly into the Alliance’s policy influence, donor engagement, and fundraising efforts through 2026.