Monitoring Child Well-being Using Child Researchers: Results from four pilot districts in Somalia

Save the Children Somalia started Community Child Researchers (CCR) initiative to create and develop a band of trained children researchers to fulfil the dual role – data from the children and by the children. It gives them the opportunity to clearly come out, express their feelings and share the opportunities and challenges that prevent them from attaining their potential. This initiative started in October 2017 with the ambition of reaching the national-level scale by mid-2019. The CCR was conceptualized in two ways, children as participants in adult supported research and as researchers themselves to design, carry out and disseminate themselves with adult support. To operationalize the former, we relied on Child Wellbeing Scorecard project where children collected data periodically on pre-determined child-focussed indicators. In this phase, 40 children were recruited and trained on data collection from 20 communities in four districts. Other than data collection, CCR were trained on how to conduct their own research outside the Child Wellbeing Scorecard project. Two (2) young researchers and a mentor were registered in each community. Child Researchers collected data once a week in their attached communities using systematic sampling to select households and random sampling to select a child in sampled households. A household head and the sampled child were interviewed using structured questionnaire to collect data. Between December 2017 and March 2019, CCR interviewed 1481 children in target districts.