Moving Towards Community Ownership: A reflection workshop guide for programme teams working in child protection

In current child protection practice, agencies typically develop and implement community-level programmes by setting up and supporting child protection committees, children’s clubs or youth groups. In this practice, it is the outside agency which makes the decisions about why, how and when to implement a programme in a particular community.

A growing body of research indicates that programmes which encourage high levels of community ownership for child protection can result in more effective and long-lasting change for children. This type of ‘community-owned approach to child protection’ builds on and supports existing community strengths and efforts to protect children. It also creates space for the community itself to decide which issues to address and how, using its own capacities and resources. Because this approach draws on the community’s own ideas, priorities and motivation to protect children, there is greater potential that the resulting actions will be effective and sustainable.

The two-day reflection workshop Moving towards community ownership outlined in this Reflection Workshop Guide has been developed with the aim of introducing a community-owned approach to child protection teams working within a given country (Part 1). The workshop provides space for teams to reflect on the extent to which their current programmes enable community ownership (Part 2), and to identify initial action to gradually move towards higher levels of community ownership in their child protection work (Part 3).