Child Protection in Emergencies: Coordination Handbook

Emergency contexts present many challenges regarding delivery of aid. The coordination of humanitarian assistance plays a central role in addressing these.

The Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (CPMS), CPWG, 2012 outlines 26 standards required to ensure adequate protection of children in emergencies. Standard 1 addresses coordination:

“Relevant and responsible authorities, humanitarian agencies, civil society organizations and representatives of affected populations coordinate their child protection efforts in order to ensure full, efficient and timely responses.”

Coordination is also embedded in many of the quality and accountability frameworks that guide humanitarian actions, such as the Core Humanitarian Standard for Quality and Accountability (CHS) (2014), the Red Cross and Red Crescent Code of Conduct and the Sphere Standard (2011).

The purpose of this Handbook is to provide actors with guidance on how to coordinate child protection responses in humanitarian contexts in order to ensure more predictable, accountable and effective child protection responses in emergencies around the world.

This Handbook is designed for situations where the international community is formally engaged with the humanitarian response and where the cluster system has been activated. The Handbook may, however, also be useful for contexts where there is no cluster approach.