Child Protection Minimum Standards Accountability to Children Toolkit

Since their launch in 2012, a broad range of humanitarian actors now work with the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (the CPMS) to better protect children facing violence, abuse, exploitation or neglect in emergencies around the world.

Through the CPMS and our 10 sector-wide principles, we have strengthened coordination with each other to ensure quality child protection programming, and improved impact. We now have joint methods to plan, do and measure our work to ensure it is effective enough to protect the many crisis-affected people who are children.

To make sure that we reach the most vulnerable children and provide them with proper protection, we need to gather their feedback and act on it. Children’s participation is not only their right, but also a way of ensuring agencies’ accountability and effectiveness of actions. A participatory and child-led approach in a humanitarian setting has the added value of reinforcing sustainable structures for long-term development. It also provides
children themselves with a chance to develop new skills and a hopeful mindset; their participation can shape their own life and those of peers and adults around them.

This Accountability to Children Toolkit was put together with the aim to empower children as stakeholders of quality child protection actions, by learning about the minimum standards in a child-friendly way. It aims to provide children with the knowledge of WHAT the CPMS are about and WHO to ask for help. In addition, it aims to provide child protection workers with guidelines on different ways to involve crisis-affected children, discussing the sta dards in a way that makes sense to them, and ensuring they know WHAT THEY CAN EXPECT FROM US.

There are 4 components to the toolkit:

• The Facilitation Guide (which is separated into two sections - one for 7-12 year old participants and one for adolescents 13-17)
• A package of cards that cover the 10 CPHA principles and 28 standards (these have CF wording on one side and a related illustration on the other; we call the standards “pledge cards”)
• A storybook for children 7-12 years old (this is used in the facilitated sessions with the younger children and/or could be circulated to all children separately)
• A game for adolescents, which includes an introduction to the CPMS, as well as game instructions, scenario cards (these are bigger than the pledge cards) and spoiler / enabler cards.

This toolkit is as child-friendly (CF) as possible, to enable equitable access in a wide variety of humanitarian contexts, and to encourage children’s participation in actions to protect them. The activities are designed to be used where the child participation system is functional, as it is important that the facilitators can carefully look at any risks associated with a particular activity, as well as refer individual children for further support as needed.

The toolkit was piloted by colleagues in different countries and contexts (thank you!). The staff at each site stated that both they and the children benefited from participating in this exercise. It’s not an easy one, and so needs to be assigned to senior, skilled child protection specialists. It takes time to brief all the people, to translate and prepare the materials. It also takes courage and integrity to allow children and adolescents to challenge how we have been working “for them”. But staff also said that they wanted to repeat the exercise in a year, see how their agency was doing, and improve their accountability to the children they are serving. Perhaps you will too. 

Certainly if you have any queries or suggestions, please contact us at cpms.wg@alliancecpha.org.