Child Protection: Considerations for Emergency Appeals and Response Plans

General issues

  1. During emergencies, humanitarian actors tend to focus on what are considered “life-saving” survival interventions, often at the expense of providing critical protection to children and women from life-threatening child protection concerns and risks.New risks and threats are triggered in emergencies, and can also be caused by the way in which assistance is organized and delivered.
  2. Emergency response strategies, plans and appeals should conceptualize CP as a comprehensive set of interventions rather than just one activity such as setting up child friendly spaces. Addressing child protection in humanitarian action requires quickly restoring and strengthening a range of child protection mechanisms to prevent and respond to various forms of violence, abuse and exploitation including separation of children from their families; association with armed forces and groups; exposure to GBV; landmines and exploded ordinance; and psychosocial distress.
  3. In order to effectively address child protection issues, it is important to recognize that CP is not only a stand-alone programme but also a cross-cutting issue that must be integrated into all aspects of humanitarian response. Activities across all sectors should promote and respect the rights and dignity of women and children and ensure that their activities do not lead or perpetuate discrimination, abuse, exploitation or violence. UNICEF has a critical role to play in ensuring that all of our sectoral interventions meet the minimum standards for prevention of and response to CP, GBV and address mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) needs.
  4. Adequate management and oversight of the UNICEF emergency programmatic response in CP will likely demand additional human capacity, which tends to be under-estimated. When preparing funding proposals and considering requirements for human resources, ensure that adequate staffing (for technical programmatic issues, administrative support and coordination including on Information Management for CP, GBV and MHPSS) are planned to scale-up, especially in major emergencies. It is also important to recognize that during some emergencies it is necessary to bring in specialized expertise on particular issues such as: family tracing and reunification, release and reintegration of children associated with armed forces/groups, monitoring and reporting as per SCR 1612, 1882, 1888, 1960, 1998, etc., MHPSS, and GBV, etc.).
  5. The appeal/response plan must include adequate and appropriate monitoring mechanisms, and appropriate budget and capacities should be put in place to support these. Ensure that monitoring mechanisms are in line with the indicators and targets included in the appeal. Especially when access is limited, consider the additional costs of third party or external monitoring in the budget. If partners’ require capacity development for monitoring, this should also be included in the plan/budget.
  6. Additional resources may be required to reach and support children, their families and community leaders to participate in assessments, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation activities in the comprehensive set of protection-related interventions.
  7. As much as possible, CP interventions should reflect and include clear commitments to build and support national capacity and community participation to ensure sustainability and appropriate use of the interventions as well as avoid disempowerment of national structures and processes.

Ensure collection of and use of sex and age disaggregated data where possible, and ensure that a gender analysis of this data (e.g. lack of access to a certain sex group, one sex group more affected than the other on this particular issue). This is very important in contexts where the gender makeris being used.

Cluster/Sector Coordination

  1. Establishment of appropriate sectoral coordination for CP, GBV and MHPSS is included under UNICEF’s CCCs, though this does not necessarily imply activation of the IASC cluster approach or UNICEF taking the lead role. At the global level, UNICEF leads the CPWG and co-leads the GBV AoR with UNFPA. At the country level, UNICEF’s role must be clearly defined and budgeted in the appeal/response plan, taking into account the specific national context. While the GBV AoR leadership is shared with UNFPA, UNICEF has equal accountability and should ensure that appropriate human and financial resources are in place to address this accountability, even if UNICEF is not the country lead agency but as part of UNICEF ultimate provider of last resort responsibility at global level.

Given its unique leadership position for both the CPWG and the GBV AoR, UNICEF should clearly articulate the linkages and collaboration between these 2 coordination mechanisms, and the unique needs of child survivors of sexual violence.

  1. As per the CCCs, UNICEF also must ensure that coordination is in place to address Mental Health and Psychosocial Support needs.This is often overlooked in appeals/response plans.

Technical issues

  1. Beyond the specific CP sectoral response, the effectiveness of other sectors’ response can be strengthened through the integration of CP considerations.CP therefore needs to proactively engage with other sectors to:
  2. identify where CP can add value to the other sectors’ response plans(e.g. ensuring all programmes include referral mechanisms for individuals requiring psychosocial support, or for potential victims of abuse and exploitation; support training of health workers on clinical management of sexual violence, facilitate delivery of key prevention messages as well as on location and access to services for survivors of GBV through different sectoral community workers, ensure consultation with women, youth and children on delivery of assistance or design of WASH services for instance) and what level of technical support will be needed from the CP section,
  3. identify how CP can integrate other sectors’ and cross-cutting(e.g. such as gender, age, ECD, disabilities, HIV/AIDS, etc.) issues into the CP response (e.g. Child Friendly Spaces programming is one very concrete example that demonstrates the inter-sectoral nature of UNICEF’s CP work), and
  4. agree on what costs need to be included in the response plan budget/appeal (and under which section’s budget).
  5. As per the CCCs, CP programming in emergencies should include, but not be limited to the following issues (see the CCCs for more details):
  • Affected communities should be mobilized to prevent and address violence, exploitation and abuse of children and women; emphasis should be laid on strengthening existing community based mechanisms for child protection; existing systems to respond to the needs of GBV survivors (including prevention of HIV through availability of PEP kits) should be improved.
  • A plan should be in place for preventing and responding to major child protection risks, building on existing systems; safe environments should be established for the most vulnerable children, women headed-households, adolescent girls.
  • An inter-agency plan should be developed and implemented for prevention of and response to child recruitment; advocacy against illegal and arbitrary detention for conflict-affected children should be conducted.
  • All unaccompanied and separated children should be identified and placed in family-based care or an appropriate alternative.
  • Periodic reports on grave violations and other serious protection concerns for children and women are available and utilized.
  • Provision of counselling for mothers/caregivers on child development, psycho-social needs in case of emergencies, and importance of play and child development.
  • Provision of child care tents for younger children of 0-6 years of age and lactating mothers, and procurement of ECD Kit and other age appropriate and safe playing materials to be used in child care tents in CFS.