Key findings of the global Child Protection Working Group (CPWG) learning and support mission to Haiti
Background on the Haitian Earthquake
On January 12, 2010, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti; with the epi-centre in the impoverished and densely inhabited capital, Port-au-Prince, it caused large scale and widespread damages. Upwards of 200,000 people were killed and more than 300,000 injured. Over 1.5 million people were affected and displaced from their homes. Children and youth represent more than half of the population affected by the disaster.
All children in the affected areas had their lives disrupted and their daily routine, including their ability to go to school, shattered. The effects of the earthquake on children, their caregivers and communities will continue for months and years during the extended process of recovery, reconstruction and restoration. Separated and unaccompanied children and those who were orphaned are particularly vulnerable to the psychosocial impact of the disaster, to illness and under-nutrition, to abduction, trafficking and sexual abuse and violence. Similarly the very young are at risk of under-nutrition and prolonged psychosocial problems, including regressive behaviour, social withdrawal and increased anxiety. This is a particular problem, as children’s reactions to a situation often mirror their parents and care-givers have also been profoundly impacted by the disaster.
Within days, there was a mass exodus from the city as people fled their destroyed and even undamaged homes fearing aftershocks. Many returned to their rural areas of origin, while others established makeshift camps around Port au Prince. The arrival of large numbers of displaced children and adults in other parts of the country unquestionably placed a major strain on services, host families and communities. The camps where many IDPs sheltered in the days after the earthquake were overcrowded and often lacked basic services. Months later, vulnerability to new emergencies is extremely high; the rainy season has started and hurricanes typically remain a threat through November.
The humanitarian response to the earthquake was sizeable. In addition to the many organizations already working in Haiti, hundreds of registered and unregistered individuals and groups flooded into the country in the initial month to work with the affected populations. International media coverage generated significant private and public funds and heightened expectations and concerns about the plight of Haiti’s girls and boys. In addition, it led to close public scrutiny of child protection interventions – or lack of interventions, and kept the spotlight on child protection for much longer than in usual emergency responses. Demand for immediate solutions to children’s protection problems was intense.
Background on Child Protection Issues in Haiti prior to the Earthquake [i]
For the past 50 years, Haiti has been experiencing a situation of increasingly extreme poverty. It is the poorest and most densely populated country in the Western hemisphere. Prior to the 12th of January 2010, four in ten children lived in absolute poverty, and seven out of ten experienced at least one form of deprivation (food, health, education, water, sanitation, shelter, information). One in seven children died by the age of 7; 22% of under 5s suffered malnutrition;and 46% of girls and women were victims of sexual violence.
Indeed, a proportion of Haitian children have always suffered from a severe under-fulfillment of their rights: victims of trafficking, child slaves or restaveks[ii], survivors of sexual violence and exploitation, orphans and children without parental care, those living with special needs, and children in the judicial system. Before the earthquake, around 200,000 children were living with disabilities and now many more have been injured,[iii] while approximately half a million children were living in the streets or in orphanages.[iv]
2007 saw the launch of the National Plan for the Protection of Vulnerable Children, developed by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour (MoSAL), supported by UNICEF, which built on the earlier establishment of the Minor Protection Brigade (BPM in French) hosted within the National Police of Haiti. Many national stakeholders believe that MOSAL could play a much stronger role in the protection of children at risk, in facilitating their recovery and transfer to the competent authority, at least in the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince. In 2004, the UN Peace-Keeping Force MINUSTAH was deployed; its mandate includes engaging in child protection issues, such as trafficking and sexual exploitation, and it has trained national counterparts and created a reporting mechanism in every province on grave child rights violations.[v]
Despite some small advances, the actual state of children’s rights in Haiti was low prior to the earthquake. Rule of law was seldom applied and a large proportion of children were exposed to different types of violence, including in schools, in the communities and within their own families. With many child protection issues remaining unaddressed prior to the earthquake, there is great concern about how the disaster has exacerbated the situation for children. However, with increased focus and funding directed to Haiti, there is also an opportunity to ensure that the root causes of child protection issues are addressed in recovery and development plans.
Aims, methodology and scope of the learning and support mission
Aims
The aims of the learning and support mission (herein referred to as “the review”), as agreed between the global CPWG and the Haiti child protection sub cluster, were to:
· document lessons learned and promising practice in the first 3 months of the emergency related to effective and efficient child protection coordination under the cluster approach;
· document lessons learned and promising practice in the first 3 months of the emergency related to the collective response to separated and unaccompanied children (including registration, family tracing and reunification, interim care, responses to trafficking, and prevention);
· define possible ways in which the CPWG and its membership can best support the interagency CP response in Haiti.
Above all, this was seen as an opportunity to draw out lessons from a large, high profile emergency at an early stage, which would enable not just the export of those lessons to other contexts, but adjustments and improvements at both the field and global level, which might also be helpful for those involved in and supporting the Haiti Child Protection response.
methodology and Scope
A team of 4 people carried out the review: the global CPWG Coordinator (Katy Barnett from UNICEF), a representative of INGOs (Misty Buswell of Save the Children), a child protection in emergencies and separated children specialist (Pernille Ironside from UNICEF HQ), and an independent consultant as team leader (Joanna Wedge). The team conducted 32 in-depth phone interviews with key informants in French or English and the team leader met with over a dozen CPiE actors for individual interviews or focus group discussions during a brief mission to Haiti in May. Many thanks are due to all key informants, who generously gave their time and reflected with honesty and often impressive clarity on the Haiti response.
A call was made for all written documents such as emails, meeting minutes or handover notes, which might provide relevant insights, and the small number of such documents received proved to be useful sources of information and ideas.
Limitations
The specificities of the Haiti earthquake, which pose a challenge to the review team coming new to this context and also limit the transferability of some of the lessons learned and promising practice, must be stressed. The scale of the earthquake, hitting at the heart of the country’s financial and administrative centre and the fact that it debilitated both government and humanitarian agencies in country are each uncommon challenges in their own right. Additionally, as is the case in all contexts, there were unique cultural, linguistic and socio-economic aspects in play, as well as the nature and level of national capacity. Of particular interest in this context were the pre-existing issues of the widely accepted practice of forcibly placing children with other families for indentured domestic work (the restaveks), the linked phenomena of widespread use of orphanages by families unable to care for their own children, and the vast number and on-going close links of both the diaspora and foreign well-wishers.
The review was intended to have been conducted almost entirely in country; however, due to constraints within the UNICEF country office in Haiti, the methodology was reworked to become chiefly based on telephone interviews. Only the team leader visited Haiti, for a short period and at a different time than originally planned. Additionally, logistical challenges in country and the limited ability of the team leader to move around the city resulted in less focus group discussions and interviews being carried out than originally planned. These factors made for a restricted amount of exchange between the review team and the members of the child protection sub cluster in country, via the Haiti-based CP coordinator. This and the limited number of interviews possible with national actors may mean that some areas of enquiry were less well explored than they could have been – for example, the coordination at sub national level, and the views of national child protection actors who did not engage fully with the child protection sub cluster.
The learning role of the global Child Protection Working Group
The global level CPWG is situated within the Global Protection Cluster and unites some twenty key actors in child protection in emergencies at the global level. The responsibilities of the group are consistent with those of a global level cluster, and include building the capacity of the CPIE sector, setting and promoting standards in CPIE programming, the development of CPIE related tools, global level advocacy, and supporting the establishment and efficient running of national CP sub-clusters.
In 2008 and 2009, the global CPWG carried out a series of reviews of coordination of CPIE at the field level. These included two multi-country reviews based on telephone interviews[vi] and two in depth examinations in Myanmar and Uganda respectively, which were carried out in each case at the field level by a small interagency team from the global CPWG. This review should be seen as the latest in this series of learning exercises undertaken by the global CPWG. It differs from previous reviews in that, in response to requests from its members, it covers a key programme area (separated children) as well as overall coordination of the response.
The cumulative learning from these reviews of CPIE coordination carried out by the global CPWG is complemented by learning from exit interviews which have been undertaken with outgoing CP coordinators wherever possible since the start of 2010. Key findings from all these sources include the need for dedicated child protection coordination capacity, and the importance of direct representation for child protection coordination groups in inter-cluster and humanitarian country team meetings (rather than via the protection cluster), along with many other lessons and indications of good practice. These findings are used to influence policy at the global level, to shape the training and technical assistance provided to CPIE coordinators, and to inform the work plan of the global CPWG.
Lessons learned from the review of the Coordination of CPiE and the RESPONSE TO Unaccompanied and Separated Children in Haiti
Coordination
1. Capacity for coordination
In contrast with prior emergencies, there was immediately a recognized need for dedicated capacity to be allocated to coordination of child protection in Haiti. Within the first 10 days of the emergency, UNICEF deployed a full-time child protection coordinator who took over from an in-country staff member. That staff member went on enforced leave which contributed to the overall break in institutional memory and lack of local technical and coordination knowledge. One month after the earthquake, a full time coordinator and assistant from the Save the Children standby team were seconded to UNICEF for a 3 month period. Although there was significant staff turnover in the first two months, the coordinator’s position remained filled throughout the response. Lessons learnt from Haiti show that perceived and actual seniority of a Coordinator can be critical to ensuring good working relations and the requisite authority with the government and other sectors for carrying out coordination activities; this is particularly true for Child Protection which is often dismissed as not a life saving intervention, “soft” or “just” a sub-cluster.
The dedicated capacity was essential in achieving any kind of coordination in a context where there were a large number of actors, many of which were new to child protection and/or emergencies and with their own staff overstretched by their own programme demands. However, in a disaster of this scale, it became apparent that the coordination capacity was not adequate for all the tasks that were required and the small size of the coordination team affected the quality, speed, and scope of the child protection response. The absence of an information management officer in particular was a key factor in the inability of the cluster to effectively gather and analyse assessment and response data – something which several other clusters and cross cutting issues did relatively well thanks to the appointment of full time national information managers.
The approach of the WASH cluster was to start with two dedicated coordinators and build up to a team of 14 by the end of the third month, including 5 information managers. In this model, functions which were normally fulfilled by WASH cluster members, such as tankering, were taken on by the cluster, and cluster members were not expected to take on coordination responsibilities. In Child Protection, staff of cluster members did take on some of the coordination responsibilities at the sub-national level, and for working groups under the national sub-cluster, combining this with their own agency programme responsibilities. Whilst this responsibility-sharing is well viewed by the cluster membership, in some cases the coordination roles and expectations were poorly defined and understood, resulting in tensions between organizations and delays in the adoption of common programme approaches.
Coordination is time-consuming, particularly when the sub-cluster has several working groups (WG), there are additional sub-national clusters and there are significant child protection concerns in other clusters, requiring a child protection cluster member to attend those meetings. Currently, there is no acknowledgement and guidance on staffing implications, especially for INGOs and government.