Child Protection Working Group Summary

SUMMARY: The child protection working group of the Child Rights in Practice Conference hosted by the International Institute for Child Rights and Development in October 2009 is exploring the idea of a new project involving the testing of monitoring and evaluation (M/E) tools for the field of child protection. The group including academics, researchers, and NGO staff from different countries agreed on the urgent need to do better testing of the current tools available for Child Protection M / E.

VISION: To develop a powerful, widely accepted Child Protection M/E tool-kit, which is credible and useful to practitioners, and widely applicable in many child protection contexts, including situations of abuse, exploitation and violence.

PROCESS:
1. Identifying domains for measurement, case study countries and current ‘users’ of child protection M/E tools.
2. Developing criteria for selecting which tools to test.
3. Identifying existing child protection M/E tools, including instruments, processes, models, indicators and diagrams.
4. Reviewing the existing child protection M/E tools according to agreed criteria.
5. Meta-Review critique of child protection M/E tools.
6. Consultation with stakeholders and ‘users’ of M/E tools, including children.
7. Revised set of child protection M/E tools.
8. Field Testing of these tools in new contexts.
9. Finalizing of Child Protection M/E tool kit.

INITIAL CRITERIA FOR SELECTION OF CHILD PROTECTION MEASURING AND EVALUATION TOOLS TO BE TESTED:
1. The involvement of children in a collaborative way in the development of indicators of success.
2. Multi-stakeholder, multi-country applicability.
3. The use of multi-level indicators - at level of child, program, organization, community, international, country.
4. A broad spectrum of focus on prevention, early intervention, protection, prosecution, rehabilitation.
5. Ability to blend with other tools.