Child Protection

Protect vulnerable children from all forms of violence

Children in Zambia continue to face abuse, neglect and violence. Almost 43% of girls aged 13-17 have reported experiencing one or more forms of violence, with more than half of these cases happening near or within their homes. 59% of girls have a child before the age of 19, and 31% are married by the age of 18. There are an estimated 13,000 children living on the streets and 20,000 child-headed households. And almost 33,000 migrants living in Zambia are under the age of 19. We aim for families, communities and government services to protect vulnerable children from all forms of violence in all settings.

Our child protection work will:

• Support resilient girls and boys to protect themselves and their peers.
• Support at-risk mothers, fathers, caregivers and communities to be able to provide quality, gender-sensitive care to children.
• Support the government, communities, and children to prevent unsafe migration through the provision of preventative, quality care and support interventions.
• Support refugee children and their families to receive adequate support and protection.
• Build child safeguarding and safe programming capacities, policies and programmes among government partners, civil society and communities.

Our Focus

We are targeting the most marginalised and deprived children in Western, Muchinga, Copperbelt, Eastern, Northern and Luapula provinces. Our focus will be vulnerable girls and boys who are:

• Migrating in Zambia from rural to urban areas.
• Migrating from other countries into Zambia or using Zambia as a transit country.
• At risk of separation or already separated from their families and survivors of violence and abuse.

Our Approach

Be the voice:

• Advocate for increased investment in child protection systems.
• Engage with government ministries to ensure that first-line migration officials have the skills and knowledge they need to ensure children are protected.
• Continue to build a strong advocacy strategy around our child protection in emergencies work.
• Advocate to help end sexual and gender-based violence against children.

Innovation:

• Conduct operational research in order to understand the protective and risk factors in family preservation and gender dynamics of reintegration.
• Continue our Parenting Without Violence work and gather evidence on its impact.
• Work closely with other partners to pilot integrated case management tools and support a digital case management system for all vulnerable children within the communities where we work.

Achieve results at scale:

• Strengthen the government's capacity to implement the legal and policy framework and provision of quality services.
• Support parents and communities to eliminate physical punishment at home and at community levels, and work with community child protection structures and mechanisms to prevent and respond to violence against children.
• Promote training of adolescent girls and boys in resiliency, life skills and access to sexual reproductive health and rights, and raise awareness around unsafe migration and trafficking.

Build partnerships:

We will establish strategic partnerships with:

• Traditional leaders and engage men and boys to help end sexual and gender-based violence against girls and boys.
• Children, host communities, civil society organisations and government ministries.
• Cooperating partners to guarantee the optimisation of skills and resources and avoid duplication of efforts.

Thematic Leadership

We have collaborated with the government and other partners to scale up our evidence-based approaches and pioneer high impact and low cost interventions in Zambia, such as the Parenting Without Violence approach.