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

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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.