The CPC is currently involved in the piloting and roll-out of the Inter-Agency Emergency Child Protection Resource Kit, an initiative of the Child Protection Working Group, with funding from UNICEF. Courtney Blake, a member of the Care and Protection of Children in Crisis-Affected Countries (CPC) Learning Network, has just returned from a pilot site in Gambella, Ethiopia, and is now documenting use of the kit by other groups. As Courtney shares, “The kit is intended to capture key child protection concerns and vulnerabilities, map out existing resources and identify needs, and help inform response and emergency preparedness and planning.” The resource kit includes guidance on desk review, including review of relevant government policies and laws; focus group discussion guides, including participative ranking methodologies; a key informant interview guide; community assessment forms; and mapping checklists for both institutional capacity and humanitarian capacity.

Thus far, the resource kit has been used—or is in the process of being used—in 12 countries across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Previous pilot sites in Georgia, Indonesia and South Africa, informed revisions earlier this year. The kit was revised again midyear, and has undergone a rigorous field testing in Gambella, Ethiopia, which produced valuable information not only on the context of child protection concerns there, but also regarding the use of the resource kit itself. Recent, upcoming and current pilot sites include Sudan, Yemen, Bhutan, and the Central African Republic. The use of the resource kit in each site represents an interagency effort led by UNICEF or an NGO partner.

Courtney is in the process of contacting those who have led the assessments, to synthesize learning and experience from the various pilot sites. Currently, interviews are being held with those who have used the resource kit, in whole or in part, or thought about using the resource kit but decided otherwise. Through such interviews, Courtney first discusses with practitioners child protection concerns on a more general level, i.e. the specifics of the emergency context and the coordination environment surrounding the assessments, before moving to more specific discussion of what parts of the resource kit were most/least useful, what worked well during the assessment process and what needed improvement, what the main findings of the in-country assessment were, and any other “lessons learned”. For those who chose not to use the toolkit, the interview addresses why they felt it wasn’t the appropriate resource for that context. The main goal of this learning exercise is to draft a series of case studies that outline the need for child protection assessments in emergencies, the use of these assessments, how a resource kit can support these objectives, and the most appropriate methods for doing so. The work also addresses the key question of how assessment findings were translated into action.

Courtney acknowledges that the job of analyzing experience across such a diverse range of pilot sites is difficult, in that every situation and context is unique. The key is in developing an approach to interviewing end users that allows for collecting information in a consistent, comparable way, to be able to distill learning across the multiple settings. And many practitioners are happy to participate. Feedback from the team leader in Ethiopia, for example, has assisted greatly with troubleshooting the different parts of the toolkit, based on the team leader’s assessment of which tools the assessment team understood and executed well, and which others required a much higher degree of supervision, such as sampling. This finding greatly enhances the team’s ability to target resource kit revisions that will translate into better experiences across settings. By soliciting and incorporating feedback grounded in field testing and direct experience, the resource kit is relying on many CPC partners to develop the initiative into a relevant, user-friendly tool for enhancing all aspects of child protection.