Introduction
This module on community mobilisation has been developed as a resource for those humanitarian and emergency workers whose engagement with child protection, brings them into contact with communities. The module aims to provide material that can assist in understanding roles and functions of the community in the realisation of children’s protection rights, the impact emergencies and disasters have on community structures and functioning, and ways and means for agencies to mobilise people and institutions in communities to achieve improvements in children’s lives.
The module builds on an earlier ARC module on community mobilisation. In this newer version, principles and standards of rightsbased approaches have been updated to bring the module into line with other resource pack modules.
The study material draws strongly on two recently published resources, A community-based approach in UNHCR’s operations from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and First line of protection from Save the Children.
Communities are important to children’s lives and to the realisation of their rights. After the family, the community provides the immediate environment for the exercise of rights. As the domain in which people share common resources (space, natural environment, resources, infrastructure, institutions, agency) it has an important function in the provision of the immediate protective and developmental environment for the developing child. The community also provides, or has the potential to provide an environment in which people can group their resources and energies and interact with agents of government, nonState actors or agencies to achieve improvements.
There is no one simple description of a typical community. Humanitarian and emergency workers will find themselves engaging with people in community institutions and structures that can vary considerably. In some instances these institutions may be well established, very strong and resilient. In others they may be much weaker, if formed at all. Planning and implementing interventions with communities will require investment of time in understanding how the community functions and how to best tailor the intervention to the particular setting.
The UN Convention on the rights of the child (CRC) provides a framework of standards and principles that can assist in planning an intervention. In a rightsbased approach, the goal of any intervention is to improve enjoyment of children’s rights. In many, if not in most or all instances, the aspirations of families and community members for children are in line with this framework. There will be occasions where humanitarian workers should work to establish these standards as the goals to which they can aspire.
Rights-based approaches also require the ways of working to be guided by human rights principles and to respect and facilitate the rights of those who are involved. In relation to both, humanitarian workers will need to be confident of their agencies’ policies and their own approach.
