Indicators to Measure Cross-sectoral Contributions to Children’s Protection and Well-being

The whole humanitarian system has a role to play in realising children’s rights, including their right to protection. Greater collaboration, action, and investment are needed to ensure all humanitarian interventions are safe, accessible, and child protection sensitive. When protecting children is a central and common objective across sectors, it contributes to greater accountability to children, provides concrete means to prevent violence, exploitation and abuse, reduces harm to children, and strengthens the overall impact of sectoral interventions.

In comprehensive inter-agency, multi-sectoral consultations from 2021-2022, the Alliance’s CPMS Working Group, engaged nearly 400 stakeholders to pinpoint obstacles, opportunities, and crucial priorities for cross-sectoral endeavours on children’s welfare. This culminated in the launch of the Inter-Sectoral Framework for Advancing Children’s Protection and Well-being, a collective steer for child protection actors and sectoral partners on priority actions for centring children and their protection needs across all programmes, in all sectors, and in all humanitarian responses. It emphasises the importance of building data, evidence, and learning to enhance practical strategies for collaboration and coordination.

In alignment with this framework, the Alliance and the CPMS WG spearheaded the development of an indicator package, specifically designed to propel children’s protection and well-being in four key sectors of humanitarian response:

1. Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM);
2. Education;
3. Food Security; and
4. Health.

The primary purpose of this package is to outline a set of indicators that measure sectoral contributions towards children’s protection and well-being. The package does this by providing technical guidance for collecting and analysing data on key indicators in humanitarian action. It includes indicator definitions, calculations and other relevant metadata needed to collect, analyse and understand the indicators.

The primary audience for the package is humanitarian technical staff, including inter-agency coordinators, technical advisors and programme managers responsible for sectoral and integrated programmes. It is highly recommended for resource mobilisation staff developing funding proposals as well as humanitarian managers and leadership responsible for humanitarian programming and strategy.