Technical Materials

Background Paper | Protection of Children from the Ground Up: Enhancing Localised Approaches in Conflict and Crises

Cover
Available in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish!
Organisation
The Alliance

Now available in Arabic, French, and Spanish! This paper aims to support the upcoming discussions during the 2025 Annual Meeting for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action. Based upon over 225 responses to the Annual Meeting Theme Survey, this year’s theme focuses on localised approaches to child protection in conflict and crises. For more information see the call for abstracts here: https://alliancecpha.org/en/2025-annual-meeting.

It begins with briefly introducing the focus of this year’s theme, providing key definitions and concepts being used in the paper, and defining three focus areas within the broad spectrum of approaches that facilitate localised, ground-up child protection. These are:

  1. Strengthening context-relevant and community-owned child protection
  2. Strengthening local systems and actors, including leadership
  3. Child and community engagement in project cycles to facilitate accountability

It then explores the three areas of focus in more depth - outlining challenges, opportunities and enabling factors, as well as offering case studies of relevant practice in child protection. Each section ends with questions for further exploration and discussion.

While the challenges and opportunities explored in this paper’s section on strengthening local systems and actors may serve to strengthen both community-owned child protection and child accountability. An analysis of these intersections has not been made, as this is an emerging area of discourse.

The paper has been developed to provide an initial exploration and framing of the meeting theme; encouraging and enabling meeting participants to reflect further together. It will be used to inform future policy and the upcoming refresh of the Alliance strategy in the areas in focus within it. The focus areas and the key questions posed throughout the paper are intended to provide suggested topics for exploration and discussion, rather than being exhaustive. 

The meeting will provide a safe space for presenters and participants to discuss their work, knowledge, and expertise on the meeting theme. Participants may wish to explore other relevant topics such as decolonisation, anti-racism, feminist intersectional approaches, and addressing the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, coloniality, as they relate to child protection in humanitarian action. This paper introduces various approaches that, along with others to be explored at the meeting, provide potential solutions to address prevailing power imbalances.

Quality abstracts from national and regional NGOs from the ‘majority world’ will be given preference over those from international organisations. Abstracts from international organisations that highlight the engagement of community, local and national actors in humanitarian action are desirable over those that do not.

Publication type
Analysis, Reports, Studies, Reviews and Research
Topics
Localisation
Countries this relates to
global
Language of the materials
English
Arabic
French
Spanish