Strengthening Child Protection Services, Support and Systems in Kachin State The Strengthening Child Protection in Kachin project will respond to the critical unmet humanitarian needs of the displaced people, particularly children, resulting from the ongoing protracted crisis in Kachin State. The project will provide support to prevent and respond to key issues affecting the safety, wellbeing, and full development of children, while building protective social systems. The project will strengthen coordination, case management and referral systems and monitoring capacity (including MRM), enhance community based child protection mechanisms and awareness, including on MRE, and it will mainstream PSS across child projection interventions, such as the establishment of CFS. This project will directly strengthen the capacity of a local partner in Kachin, Pyoe Development Organization (PDO), to implement this and ongoing child protection interventions, with the support and technical guidance from WVM.

The project will directly provide increased child protection support and access to approximately 1,705 children (855 G, 850 B) from 695 HHs 15 IDP camps (including 1 IDP resettlement village) in Myitkyina, Waingmaw, and Mogaung townships. The project will also directly reach 450 adults (225 F, 225 M) and will indirectly reach approximately 1,493 additional adults (761 F, 732 M) within the communities. At present, there is a gap in Child Protection in Emergency (CPiE) services in these targeted locations.

This will be achieved through 5 key outcomes:
1. Established and functioning community-based child protection mechanisms to prevent and respond to child abuse and violations
2. Increased community engagement to prevent and reduce violence against children, including mine risk education
3. Child Friendly Spaces (CFS) are established and functioning in the target areas
4. Increased Psycho-Social Support (PSS) Services and mainstreaming
5. Increased provision of case management, monitoring, reporting and supporting services to vulnerable, abused, unaccompanied and separated children.

The project will ensure that the needs, priorities, contributions and capacities of women, men, girls and boys are considered in all aspects of the response and that humanitarian actions neither exacerbate inequalities nor inadvertently put males or females at risk. Gender equality principles are integrated in implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The project will ensure that in all activities the environment will be healthy, safe and free from discrimination for all people, girls, boys, women, and men. The project will ensure equal access to women for leadership roles, including girls as leaders in their child group, and women as leaders of child protection action groups and other facilitator roles. In all activities girls, boys, women and men will be invited to participate, promote awareness on the gender equality and women empowerment. The project will also target supporting children and persons with disabilities in all activities . 

Moreover, it will integrate land mine risk education into training activities. It will also mainstream protection including Do No Harm principles, and conflict sensitivity throughout the implementation. This project responds directly to the immediate needs of the vulnerable people as collected through community consultations by Pyoe and World Vision Myanmar (WVM) in the target area in 2019 as well as the Child Protection Watch Group assessment of coverage in Kachin State in September 2019, which showed many of the target areas with exposure to violations and needs for support and monitoring. 

The project responds to the needs expressed in the MHF Allocation Strategy and 2019 Humanitarian Response Plan. It will directly contribute to the Protection Sector Objectives 2 and 3, as well as MHF SRP Objectives 2 and 3.