The Secret to Safeguarding Children? Trust.

Sometimes the hardest part of solving a problem is seeing it clearly.

So in southern Iraq, where conflict has pushed unemployment up and literacy rates down, War Child’s first step towards protecting vulnerable kids is to find the ones who’ve quietly slipped through the cracks.

To do so, the UK-based NGO mobilizes communities’ most vital resource: locals themselves, which it gathers into child protection committees made of teachers, parents, and leaders—“each representing a different section of the society”, says its program director. Together they look out for kids who’ve dropped out of sight, pulled from school into early marriages or jobs to help their families, forming a new social safety net to catch these at-risk children, whom War Child supplies with solutions.

These can be simple: a wheelchair for a disabled girl lets her sister stop care-taking her and go back to school. A father who’s forced his daughter to join him in factory work can be swayed by local leaders to let her return to her studies.

The key, says the director, is “to consider the specific needs of various groups in getting their voices heard.” Out-of-school girls, for instance, “face particular gender-specific vulnerabilities, such as not wanting to attend school because there are no separate toilets for girls, something they might not feel comfortable talking about with males present.”

Having worked in Iraq since 2003, the group’s deep community support “allows us to access those who might otherwise be hard to reach.”

For more info – War Child’s website