The benefits of social protection and humanitarian actors working together in different ways across the “nexus” is well-recognised. In order to address the wide range of needs (in the last year, often pandemic-related), and particularly those of a socio-economic nature, the use of cash has been the response of choice for governments expanding their social protection systems as well as for humanitarian actors in a range of sectors, including child protection.

This event, which was interactive in nature, provided the opportunity to hear from humanitarian and social protection actors as they share their experiences in linking child protection approaches with humanitarian cash interventions and social protection, drawing on the recent policy paper published by The Alliance for Children Protection in Humanitarian Action, UNICEF, and Save The Children. The initial discussion saw representatives from World Vision International, The Alliance, and Save the Children highlight:

• Policy and coordination: How closer coordination between humanitarian and national systems can offer opportunities to address the rights of excluded and at-risk groups in the short and longer-term.
• Policy and coordination: How close collaboration across Social Protection and Child Protection sectors can address the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 on children and families towards reduction of adverse Child Protection outcomes.
• Implementation: How cash transfers can address several different sectoral outcomes with relevance to child protection, including reducing monetary poverty, increasing women’s empowerment, and improving school enrolment and attendance, amongst other key outcomes, particularly when linked to other services and when efforts are made to address unequal gender norms and power dynamics.
• M&E: The importance of gathering sex, age, and disability related data.
• M&E: The need to study and analyse the key bottlenecks and accelerators to aligning social protection and child protection services in humanitarian and fragile contexts

The discussion also addressed some of the challenges in bringing child protection and social protection together in a number of humanitarian contexts and illustrated practical ways in which the sectors can pull together to deliver greater results for children.

Following the initial discussion by agency experts, the audience was moved into remote breakout rooms to briefly consider one or two critical questions in relation to child protection, social protection and humanitarian cash.

Experts: