Children in Emergencies Manual

This manual was written for staff who may be called upon to respond to the issues facing children in a humanitarian emergency. It provides practical tools and templates to plan responses; these also can be used for disaster preparedness. Some of the tools were developed or adapted from documents created by a number of child-focused NGOs and UN agencies.

The manual is divided into sections, starting with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international humanitarian legal framework for protecting children. It then looks at the key issues for children in emergencies and disasters, how to assess the situation for children, how to design a response, standards for protecting children in a response, and training modules. Each section can be taken out and used as a stand-alone chapter. For example, the assessment forms can be pulled out and used in focus group discussions. The manual is not designed to be read from start to finish. World Vision has been facilitating a training programme using the manual for reference.

The Children in Emergencies Manual can be used by people in many different roles in an emergency: programme officers who need to know the key elements to put in a grant proposal, Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) staff who need to identify M&E points, specialist children’s programme staff who need technical support, and managers needing to know what they should be doing to protect children from a management perspective. The manual will be useful for local NGOs, faith-based groups, communities, children’s groups, local authorities and governments, as well as individuals who are interested in protecting children in emergencies.