Putting Children First: Identifying solutions and taking action to tackle poverty and inequality in Africa. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 23-25 October 2017 This three-day international conference aimed to engage policy makers, practitioners and researchers in identifying solutions for fighting child poverty and inequality in Africa, and in inspiring action towards change. The conference offered a platform for bridging divides across sectors, disciplines and policy, practice and research.

1. Strengthening Community-Based
Child Protection for Vulnerable Children
in Sierra Leone:
Toward a Child Centered, Inclusive,
Community Owned Approach
Mike Wessells
Columbia University &
Inter-Agency Learning Initiative
October 24, 2017
1

2. Acknowledgements
 ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation
 Oak Foundation & an anonymous donor
 The Inter-Agency Learning Initiative on Strengthening
Community-Based Child Protection Mechanisms and
Child Protection Systems
 Sarah Lilley & Save the Children for coordinating the
global Reference Group
 UNICEF Sierra Leone
 Key Sierra Leonean actors, especially David Lamin
 Participating communities
2

3. Overview
 Throughout Africa, child protection system strengthening
is a high priority
 Many efforts at system strengthening have been top-down,
vested power in NGOs, and built limited participation and
community ownership and low sustainability
 Eurocentric approaches marginalize African culture, local
strengths, and community resilience
 Need to develop and test a different model of community
driven action—participatory action research in Sierra Leone
 System strengthening requires a mix of top-down, bottom-
up, and middle-out approaches

4. Risks to Children
 Armed conflict & mass displacement
 Sexual abuse and exploitation
 Disabilities
 Violence--family, schools, community
 Early marriage
 Justice related issues
 Living & working on the streets
 Dangerous labor
 Trafficking
 Recruitment into armed forces and groups
 Poverty, deprivations, discrimination, poor material
conditions
 HIV and AIDS

5. Community-Based
Child Protection Mechanisms
 Key components of a national child protection system;
where children live and develop, where people live
 NGO/UN focus: External agencies frequently organize
Child Welfare Committees (CWCs) or other community
mechanisms to monitor, respond to, mitigate, and
prevent various forms of child abuse
 Partnership approach, yet NGOs are in positions of
power and take the key decisions
 Expert driven, top-down, impositional approach
 Children may be involved, but participation is typically
limited, even tokenistic

6. Some Critical Questions
 Are we listening to children and learning about their
lived experiences?
 Are we doing enough to enable children’s and
adolescents’ agency and leadership?
 Do top-down approaches build upon or marginalize
existing mechanisms and local culture and processes?
 How inclusive are top-down approaches? Do the
poorest, most marginalized people engage in planning
them, and do they use the CWCs?
 How effective and sustainable are CWCs?
 Can community led approaches do a better job of
unlocking community creativity, enabling
sustainability, and give space for community agency and
action?

7. Case of Sierra Leone
 Brutal, decade long war
 Many Child Welfare Committees established
 2007—Child Rights Act mandated CWC in
each village: Top down approach
 Implementation focused on training committee
members and on didactic child rights education
 Alternate, collaborative & community led aproach
- Inter-Agency research approach—with Government,
NGOs, UN, communities
- Trained national researchers lived and worked in local
communities, collecting data on the actual functioning
of the child protection system

8. Intervention Cluster
Comparison Cluster
Defini on of Outcomes based on local views
Ethnography on all 12 villages
Iden fica on of 2 districts, 4 chiefdoms, 12 villages
Bombali District
Chiefdom A
3 villages
Chiefdom B
3 villages
Moyamba District
Chiefdom C
3 villages
Chiefdom D
3 villages
Randomization of Chiefdom and 3 villages clusters to intervention or comparison group
T1:Baseline data
T2: Repeated data
Intervention
T3: Repeated data
T1: Baseline data
T2: Repeated Data
No intervention
T3: Repeated data
Multi-Phase Action Research Design

9. Ethnographic Research:
Local Views of Harms to Children
‘Most serious’ harms
 Out of school children
 Teen pregnancy out of
wedlock
 Heavy work
 Maltreatment of children
not living with their
biological parents
Additional harms
 Child beating
 Cruelty
 Incest, rape, and sexual
abuse
 Neglect and bad parenting
 Witchcraft
 Abduction & ritual murder
 Child rights

10. Typical Response Pathway for
Teenage Pregnancy
Girl misses period
Girl tells mother Mother tells girl’s father
Perpetrator identified
Negotiation between families
of the girl & the perpetrator
OUTCOMES: Perpetrator’s family supports girl during
pregnancy and pays for her education afterward
Girl is obliged to marry the perpetrator

11. Disconnect Between Nonformal and
Formal Supports for Children
 Child Welfare Committees had been mandated by the
Child Rights Act (2007), but
- Most people did not mention or report through the
CWCs
- For over 90% of the cases of harms to children, people
preferred to use traditional processes through the Chiefs
 Even for crimes such as rape of a child, people were
reluctant to report to police and state authorities
 Main reasons related to distance to authorities, having to
take time off from farming, doubts that action would be
taken, culture

12. Implications
1. The Child Rights Act was not working.
2. A significant disconnect exists between the formal
child protection system and community based child
protection mechanisms. Prioritize the development of
effective linkages between communities and the
national child protection system.
3. We need to rethink the common practice of
establishing child protection committees and groups
that do not build on or intersect with existing
community mechanisms.
4. The imposition of international concepts of child
protection (e.g., ‘child rights’) has had harmful effects.
Alternative, respectful approaches toward social
transformation are necessary.

13. A Different Approach
 Communities hold power & make key decisions
 Cultural understandings, processes, and practices as
resources
 Outsiders as learners, facilitators, documentors
 Respectful listening and learning
 Feeding information back and inviting reflection
 Reflection and mobilization as basis for community-driven
action
 Bottom-up approach to building linkages between
community and the formal system
 Problematizing ‘community’—attending more to issues of
diversity and power

14. Enabling Inclusivity
 Facilitators lived and worked in villages—trust, respect
 Enabling an inclusive process of deciding which harm
to children to address
 Asked questions about ‘how can the community
decide which issue to address?’
 Helped to bring out different views and enable
problem solving discussion
 Mixture of ‘barray’ discussions and small group
discussions, with outreach to marginalized people
 Slow, respectful process of dialogue enabled people to
process their differences and achieve workable
agreements

15. Community-Driven Intervention
 Six communities—three each in one Chiefdom of
Bombali and Moyamba District, respectively
 External, Sierra Leonean facilitators lived and worked
in the villages
 Diversity and inclusivity in planning/action: teenage
girls, teenage boys, women, men, elders
 Priority issue to address: teenage pregnancy
 Chose to address it through family planning, sexual and
reproductive health education, and life skills
 Population based measures of children’s risk and well-
being outcomes

16. Key Elements of the Intervention
 Collective dialogue, awareness raising and negotiation—
stimulating new appreciation of value of diversity
 Inclusive decision-making, empowerment, and
responsibility
 Linkage of community with health services
 Peer education
 Use of culturally relevant media—song, drama
 Child leadership and messaging—‘5920’
 Inclusion and outreach—sub-groups, home visits
 Parent-child discussions
 Role modeling
 Legitimation by authority

17. Promising Findings, Pre-Ebola
 Reduced teenage pregnancy and sexual abuse
 Increased access to and use of contraceptives
 Increased intent of girls and their close friends to ask partners to
use condoms
 Stronger linkage of communities with the formal health system
 Reduced school dropout
 Girls say ‘No’ more often to unwanted sex
 Parents and children discuss sex, pregnancy, and pregnancy
prevention in a constructive manner
 Spin off effects—addressing early marriage
 Strong community ownership and motivation to continue the work
without external support

18. Implications for Practitioners
 Use elicitive, respectful methods in assessment
 Learn about local power structure
 Learn about and engage with natural helpers
 Engage with people who are positioned differently
 Encourage collective reflection, planning, and action
regarding children’s issues
 Enable child and youth agency and leadership
 Rethink our role—from ‘expert’ to co-learner and
facilitator
 Document and learn from Do No Harm issues
 Model and enable critical, reflective practice

19. Wider Impact
 Revision of the national Child and Family
Welfare Policy
- balance and cooperation between formal and
nonformal aspects of the national child
protection system
- family and community mechanisms at center
- no new structures
 Workshops with practitioner agencies
 New mode of work by UNICEF—scaling up the
community-driven approach
 National Child Protection Committee support

20. Conclusion
 Respect the importance of supporting both the
nonformal and formal aspects of child protection
systems and their alignment
 Community-driven action is a platform for
sustainable support for at-risk children and also
for social transformation
 Both diversity and inclusivity are vital components
of change
 Community-driven (bottom-up) strengthening of
the child protection system is an effective
complement to top-down approaches