Peer Networking and Capacity Building for Child Protection Professionals – Lessons from “ChildHub”

Abstract

Child protection systems across the global South suffer from common problems, one of the most critical among which is low number and skills of relevant professionals to deliver services. Additionally, child protection professionals are often demotivated, uncoordinated and isolated, with limited access to continuous training and support. Peer learning and capacity building networks help address these issue, and often leverage the spread and scope of information and communications technologies. We present one such network, ChildHub, initially developed and deployed in South-East Europe, a region whose child protection systems present features similar to those in Africa and Asia. The success of this platform, evinced by a continuously growing community and confirmed by an evaluation after three years of operation, provides motivation and lessons for contextualization to sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. Thanks to its inherent modularity, ChildHub will easily be adapted to the contexts and needs of the two regions, thus building on the interest generated in Asia and Africa for such networks. The paper also presents the approach that will be taken to implement the platform for Africa and Asia.