Child Friendly Spaces

Child Friendly Spaces (CFSs), also called Safe Spaces, Child Centered Spaces, and Emergency Spaces for Children, have become a widely used in emergency situations, where they are often taken to scale quickly. CFSs typically intermix nonformal education, protection, and psychosocial supports, and they can be tailored to meet the needs of different age groups such as children in the categories 0-6, 7-12, and 13-18 years. Surprisingly, few studies have evaluated the outcomes of CFSs especially in multiple contexts and with different agencies. This study will include a minimum of three countries from different regions, a mixture of emergencies and ongoing crisis situations, a quasi-experimental design, and measures of psychosocial well-being as well as protection and nonformal education.

Public Awareness on Coping Skills

In crisis situations, children and adults are not passive but actively engage with the various risks and sources of distress. Whether and how children engage in positive ways depends on their coping skills, which are learned in part from interaction with parents. Also, positive coping skills can be strengthened in crisis situations by public awareness campaigns, which are sometimes referred to as a form of psycho-education, and also by trainings for parents. In multiple countries and regions, this study will examine the influence of specific behavior change strategies for strengthening children’s positive coping skills and the effects of the coping skills on children’s psychosocial well-being.

School–Based Interventions

During and following crises, participation in education is a high priority for youth and children, and schools offer a means of reaching significant numbers of crisis affected children. Yet access and participation are not sufficient to insure children’s psychosocial well-being. Some children may be too affected to be able to benefit from education without the development of specific supports within the school setting. Also, schools can be a significant source of exploitation and harm if steps are not taken to make them child friendly. For these reasons, it is useful to integrate psychosocial supports into the activities and cultures of schools. Yet there are many approaches to organizing psychosocial support in schools, and it is unclear which ones are most effective. This study will examine in multiple countries and regions the outcomes of at least two different approaches to providing psychosocial support in schools.