Inter-Agency Research on Strengthening Community Based Child Protection for Vulnerable Children in Sierra Leone

In many parts of the world, widespread abuse of children's rights to care and protection is hindering progress in alleviating poverty and ensuring the poorest and most vulnerable children are able to gain their basic rights. Across contexts, children face widespread protection risks including family separation, displacement, attack, sexual exploitation and abuse, recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups, trafficking, child labour, neglect and lack of care among many others. These violations have significant and lasting harmful effects on children's well-being and long term success. How to respond to prevent and mitigate these risks on a wide scale is a profound yet unanswered problem that is being explored in new interagency research in Sierra Leone.

Alongside government and the family, the community is a crucial source of potential support for children vulnerable to child protection risks. A significant gap is that community protection for children are often not backed by effective support from aspects of the government system such as social workers and police. This research will for the first time systematically evaluate the effect of community-led interventions to better link communties with government services and systems to support vulnerable children. Importantly the research will develop and measure children's protection and well-being outcomes, that is the real changes that children experience in their health, safety and happiness. The research will provide a unique opportunity to tell us if and how these community-led interventions are effective, how they can be sustainable and also how they can be taken to scale to impact on larger numbers of vulnerable and marginalised children.

Using a public health approach this research will develop population-based measures of children's protection and well-being outcomes. This inter-agency evaluation brings together in collaboration for the first time, key international organisations who are implementing and funding child protection programmes. It is therefore an extraordinary opportunity to fill some of the significant evidence gaps and inform deep changes in policy and practice across these organisations and more widely.

Through this inter-agency evaluation initiative, the following critical questions for child protection policy will begin to be answered:
1. Do community-led interventions to strengthen linkages with formal systems improve children's protection and well-being outcomes?
2. How can changes in the effectiveness of child protection mechanisms be measured using population based measures of children's protection and well-being be that reflect a mixture of local understandings and also international child protection standards?

The research will run from 2012 to 2014 in two Districts in Sierra Leone - Moyamba and Bombali Districts. The research is led by the Columbia Group for Children in Adversity in partnership with Save the Children.

The proposed research results could have significant impact in Sierra Leone and across the global child protection sector therefore the beneficiaries of the research will be at national and global level. In Sierra Leone, the beneficiaries will be:
1. Children and adult community members who are part of, or affected by child protection issues, including children affected by HIV and those living without appropriate care. The research findings and the participatory process of the programmatic intervention, will improve community level practice to prevent and respond to child protection violations. The ethnographic phase of the research has already demonstated the impact the research can have. In the process of feeding back the ethnographic findings to communities, and in response to a key finding about high levels of teengage pregnancy and associated risks, one of the research site communities decided to pass a new by-law to ensure that all teengage pregnancies which occur as a result of sexual abuse are reported and dealt with through the proper channels. It is expected that the research will also contribute to increased awareness of child protection issues and potentially decrease stigma associated with such issues in communities.
2. Chiefs and decision makers in non-formal components of the child protection system. In Sierra Leone, government services for child protection do not extend operationally into rural areas therefore Chiefs and other community leaders are a critically important group to engage in the research.
3. Local government staff in the research sites including social workers, police, family support unit staff, health workers and teachers. The research will provide evidence and generate information about how such workers can reach out and engage communities to better protect children.
4. The government of Sierra Leone, in particular policy makers responsible for social welfare and resource allocation for child protection. The Ministry for Social Welfare, which is the primary government department responsible for child protection, is the least funded government department. Policy-makers in this Ministry desperately require robust evidence of the cost-effectiveness of protection interventions to advocate for increased resource allocation from the national budget. The results of the ethnographic phase were received with keen interest by the Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children's Affairs, signalling the future impact the research can have on government policy.
5. UNICEF and non-governmental organisations in Sierra Leone which are supporting protection programmes for the most vulnerable children, in particular Save the Children, World Vision, Plan International, War Child Holland, Defence for Children International and the International Rescue Committee. These organisations require robust evidence to help them support more effective interventions, including improving the effectiveness of, and scaling-up, current interventions.

At global level the beneficiaries will be:
1. Governments in the many other countries and regions which are implementing community-based child protection, who require examples of what works in strengthening and measuring the effectiveness of national child protection systems.
2. Donors for child protection programmes such as DFID, USAID, UNICEF and the European Commission which require evidence of what works and examples of indicators to measure child protection outcomes.
3. UN Agencies and International NGOs (including those listed above) who are supporting large child protection programmes globally. It is expected that in other countries agencies will use similar outcome measures and processes to strengthen the evidence base, building on this model of good practice.
4. Inter-agency technical working groups in the global child protection community such as the Child Protection Working Group who design standards and guidance for the sector.