Report | An Overview of the 2025 Annual Meeting for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action

From the 3rd to the 5th of June, 841 participants from across the globe—including practitioners, donors, academics, policymakers, youth and child advocates, and community leaders—came together for the 2025 Annual Meeting for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action, hosted by the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action.

Spanning 18 sessions, the meeting explored how the child protection sector is adapting and responding in a rapidly changing humanitarian landscape. The focus was clear: How to strengthen local and national systems and actions, including local ownership and leadership of accountable child protection actions, how to strengthen equitable partnerships for child protection, and how to continue to centre children’s rights and their right to protection - especially in the face of growing political, financial, and operational pressures.

Highlights from the Meeting Included:

• Strong local leadership and participation: Local actors and national organisations shaped many of the discussions—sharing the leadership roles they have taken, rich experiences across diverse contexts, and practical solutions to entrenched barriers in the system.
• Children and young people front and centre: Child and youth advocates from conflict and crisis contexts, powerfully reminded us of their current realities, the efforts they are leading and what they gain from this, and the importance of listening to each other and working together.
• Child protection systems strengthening: Examples of locally owned social protection and child care mechanisms informing public policy and being adapted in times of crises to protect children were shared. Alongside calls to value indigenous knowledge and amplify existing voices before stepping in.
• Urgent calls for localisation: Participants pushed back against top-down models of capacity “building”, calling instead for shifts in power, resources, visibility, and decision-making to local actors—not as a future goal, but a present, urgent necessity.
• New ideas to strengthen ground-up approaches to child protection: From interactive ways of facilitating children’s participation in the programme cycle, to community-led project design, participants shared innovations and adaptations that are helping practitioners respond more effectively and collaboratively to child protection risks in today’s complex crises.
• Recognition of the impacts of the funding crisis and the need to enhance collaboration for continued, quality child protection: Practitioners shared how cuts are reducing critical child protection programmes and shrinking teams—yet also spotlighted how partnerships and collective action, including across sectors, are helping sustain impact.
• A reaffirmation of core principles: Amid increasing fragmentation, the Alliance’s common standards and frameworks—like the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action—were seen as anchors that help hold the line on quality programming, effective coordination, and accountability.
• Hearing directly from donors: A panel discussion with representatives from Norway, ECHO, Denmark, Canada, UNHCR, and Beyond the Classroom Foundation Nigeria shed light on donor priorities, constraints, and strategies for maintaining child protection as a humanitarian priority as well as the challenges of and guidance for strengthening funding to local and national organisations.
• Emerging findings on the Vancouver Principles: A session shared early findings from an Alliance-UNICEF-Plan study exploring collaboration between peacekeeping operations and child protection actors to prevent recruitment, enable release, and support reintegration of children associated with armed forces and groups.
• Planting the seeds of an Alliance position and eventual policy on investing in local and national Child Protection Systems and Actors in humanitarian contexts.

A position paper on ground-up approaches to strengthening local and national child protection systems and actors is currently being developed building on the meeting Background Paper and learning from the meeting sessions.