Refugee Child Protection

/ Our Approach / Child Protection

A commitment to child protection underpins all that we do at RefugePoint.

Children are disproportionately impacted by forced displacement. 40% of refugees are children, despite the fact that children account for only 25% of the world’s population. Many refugee children have lost their traditional support systems (extended family, neighbors, teachers), leaving them especially susceptible to abuse, violence, exploitation, and continued trauma. Their schooling is also frequently interrupted, often put on hold for years on end.

Since our founding in 2005, RefugePoint has worked to address the critical gap in protecting and resettling unaccompanied and separated refugee children. This is an area of focus for our organization.

How RefugePoint helps to protect children

We support refugee children in a number of ways, including:

Protection Assessments

Resettlement

Family Reunification

Urban Refugee Protection Program

Assessing Gaps

Self Reliance - Urban Refugee Protection

Protection Assessments

For children who are unaccompanied, orphaned, or separated from their parents, our Child Protection Experts conduct assessments to evaluate their situation and determine the best long-term solutions. These assessments help identify necessary services and referrals, serving as a crucial step toward pathways like resettlement.

Resettlement

We help unaccompanied and separated children to resettle to a country with an appropriate care system in place. We also support children under the care of another family to resettle with that family.

Family Reunification

We help to reunite children with parents and other surviving family members.

Urban Refugee Protection Program

Through our Urban Refugee Protection Program (URPP) in Nairobi, Kenya, we support children and their caregivers with essential services such as psychosocial support, food assistance, livelihood support, and medical assistance.

Assessing Gaps

In addition to individual casework, our child protection staff assess gaps in child protection systems wherever they are working and help UNHCR, governments, and other partners, fill these gaps. Our Child Protection Experts also conduct trainings and other capacity-building for partner agencies around the world.

Voices of
Resilience:
Refugee Stories

Hear from children who have been impacted by RefugePoint programming, and from our Child Protection team members.

“Being at school the whole day, I don’t have to worry about everything at home. There are some times when we don’t have enough food to cook. When I am at school, I don’t have to worry about food, about family, or anything like that. All I have to worry about is my studies.”

Latifa

“Everything for us has changed since RefugePoint started assisting us. Our social worker has always gone out of her way to make sure that we are okay. We would like RefugePoint to continue to help other children the way that they have helped us.”

Denisa

“I became separated from my parents and I never saw them again. A woman in her 70’s found me on the forest floor, and she became my caretaker. I lived with her in Nairobi and called her grandmother, until I was 16, when she died. When she died, I had nobody else, and RefugePoint helped me. RefugePoint was more than just an organization to me. For the first time, I met people who really cared about helping me.”

Edith

“I have the heart to go to university and change my life, and even change the lives of others. Besides my career, the thing that I want to achieve in life is to help my family live a healthy life. [Since I was ten years old] I have not seen my family having a healthy life, enjoying life, having fun, because of the difficulties we have been passing through. I want to change my family and I want to change my community.”

Michael

Expert Perspective: Child Protection

James, a RefugePoint Child Protection Expert, explains what child protection entails.

“Children are our future leaders; therefore, if we safeguard their rights, if we protect them, if we stand in and ensure that their well-being is protected, then we stand to have a better tomorrow.”