Disability-inclusive Child Safeguarding Guidelines and Toolkit

These guidelines have been developed to respond to an existing gap in child safeguarding practices, which often fail to recognize the specific requirements and adaptations needed to ensure the safety of children with disabilities.

The guidelines build on consultations with children and youth with disabilities as well as experience from over 20 organisations. They serve to build knowledge and frame the rationale supporting the relevance and necessity of Disability-Inclusive Child Safeguarding.

Through the guidelines, you will find information about best practices, as well as practical tools and helpful recommendations. The different chapters are useful for both organising for disability-inclusive child safeguarding and for making each step of the child safeguarding cycle disability-inclusive. For example the guidelines include practical recommendations on how to,

• embed a disability-inclusive lens into child-safeguarding policies, codes of conduct and on-boarding procedures
• plan, design and conduct activities to increase awareness on disability-inclusive child safeguarding
• plan for and mitigate physical, emotional, financial and medical risks before, during and after activities to ensure children with disabilities are safe during programme delivery
• set up reporting mechanisms that are inclusive of children with different types of disabilities
• plan for and conduct disability-inclusive child safeguarding response systems that meet the requirements of children with different disabilities

The toolkit provides helpful solutions for organisations and practitioners working across development and humanitarian sectors on how to plan for disability-inclusive child safeguarding programmes. Each tool provided shows how to include children with disabilities within programmes, this is important as it is essential we identify, monitor, and build into our programme design risks that children with disabilities may experience as a result of engaging in activities or programmes.