A long road to get to the beginning

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The award of a HIF Small Grant, funding the opportunity for refugee children to be innovators in relation to their own protection, is very welcome news. As a Consortium, we have a strong commitment to children’s right to participation and belief in the contributions children can make to a more effective humanitarian response. We are both excited and interested to hear what children living in the refugee settlement ‘Kyaka II’ in Uganda have to say about the refugee protection process and how it might more effectively meet their needs.

This project is a collaborative effort. On the one hand, it is linked to broader PhD research on refugee children’s participation in protection. The PhD Researcher, based at the Centre for Migration Policy Research (CMPR) at Swansea University, has secured a UNHCR Small Grant to undertake an initial month’s mapping of refugee children’s participation in relation to their protection in Kyaka II in March 2012. A paper will be produced for UNHCR as a result of this initial research. The HIF funded project will also form part of the PhD research connected with the CMPR. The CMPR has extensive experience of working with refugee children and has a research strand which focuses on children’s experiences of migration.

On the other hand, the project is also very much connected to the work of the other Consortium members. UNHCR are currently drafting a new Protection Agenda for Children with goals related to child participation and child friendly protection processes. Save the Children is engaged in a series of child participation pilots as part of its global Accountability Breakthrough, including child friendly complaint reporting mechanisms to address protection and other concerns in a refugee camp setting. GIZ as a camp management agency are engaged in delivering on protection in Uganda and building staff and local capacity on both child protection and child participation. Save the Children’s Participation Unit offers resources and expertise in terms of participatory methods and techniques.

Although we have only just been awarded the grant and are about to begin our project, it has been a relatively lengthy process to get to this point. Originally submitting to conduct the fieldwork in Dadaab, NE Kenya, the emergency drought response and deteriorating security conditions in the region meant that the research could no longer be hosted in that camp. However, a previous scoping visit by the Researcher to Dadaab, funded by Save the Children, provided useful background information on refugee children’s participation in the protection process and a chance to pilot interviews and workshops with humanitarian practitioners. Later work by the Researcher with UNHCR enabled the piloting of participatory workshops with refugee children aged 6-10 and 11-16 on protection issues and concerns and much learning in relation to appropriate methodology and the ethics of participation in a refugee camp context. Finally, communication through the Consortium and partner organisations produced Kyaka II as an alternative fieldwork location and GIZ as host for the HIF research. It also built additional interest in the project from practitioners working with refugee children in Ethiopia, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Kenya, all of whom will be kept up-to-date with the project and its results.

We are now still ‘pre-HIF’ in that our HIF funded work will begin in April 2012. However, the UNHCR Small Grant funded research, about to begin in Uganda on March 2^nd, will also provide an essential introduction to Kyaka II, to refugee children and humanitarian practitioners in the settlement and to children’s participation in their protection, all important for the HIF project to follow. It will also enable further piloting of methods in relation to culture and context.

The next blog, therefore, will be from the field – from the GIZ office in Kyaka II – at the beginning of March.

Anna Skeels - PhD Researcher, CMPR