Resources for Safe Spaces for Children in Humanitarian Settings: Overview

Safe Spaces for children, including Child Friendly Spaces (CFS), are interventions used by humanitarian agencies to increase children’s access to safe environments and promote their psychosocial well-being. Some safe spaces may focus on informal education or other needs related to children. However, all try to provide a child-centered place where children can come together to play, relax, express themselves, feel supported, and learn skills to deal with the challenges they face. Safe Space programming often addresses one or more of the following three specific objectives:

• Protection from risk;
• Promotion of psychosocial well-being; and/or
• Strengthening of community child protection capacities.

These resources each cover psychosocial elements key to safe space programming and have detailed activities to support their implementation. They can also be used to complement and reinforce one another.