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On 22 April, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), PHAP, and the Global Protection Cluster (GPC) organized the first of a series of webinars on access and humanitarian protection. The event provided an overview of the key terms, concepts, interlinkages, and dilemmas of protection and access in armed conflict, disaster, and health emergencies. What are the main protection concerns particular to hard-to-reach areas? What challenges do protection actors face in terms of access? Are maintaining access and protection priorities at cross purposes or can they help reinforce each other? This introduction was followed by a discussion with protection experts, exploring the ways in which existing lessons from protection programming in hard-to-reach areas can be applied to protection operations in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The webinar recording and it's transcript are available

This resource pack provides advice and guidance for parents and caregivers on how best to protect and support their children with disabilities during the COVID-19 outbreak

The Global Protection Cluster (GPC) and its field operations are working closely with partners and governments to ensure the inclusion of those in need of protection as a result of conflict, disasters and climate change in national and local COVID-19 preparedness, prevention and response activities. This page shares protection-related information and resources on COVID-19, including examples of operational tools produced by field clusters.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) adopts a twin-track approach to ensure the full inclusion of Palestine refugees with disabilities. This entails ‘disability mainstreaming’, whereby all UNRWA programmes and services are universally designed to ensure that they are usable by and/or reach beneficiaries with disabilities, coupled with the provision of ‘targeted/tailored interventions’. During 2019, UNRWA implemented the following activities to address the specific needs of Palestine refugees with disabilities:

• Direct Specialized Services for Persons with Disabilities
• Disability Inclusion through Programmes
• International Cooperation

This rapid review addresses the queries:

• What is known about the prevalence, incidence and severity of the sexual exploitation and abuse and sexual harassment of people with disabilities. This should take into account age and gender where possible, and humanitarian and conflict contexts. It would be good to know: - Globally and in specific regions, what evidence exists about the extent of sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment of people with disabilities (disaggregated by age and gender)?
• What evidence exists about the extent of sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment of people with disabilities in the aid sector, including both recipients of aid and working in the aid sector (disaggregated by age and gender)?
• What are the barriers to reporting for people with disabilities?
• What is your assessment of the quality of the evidence? Where are the gaps?

This publication shares the experiences of five disability-inclusive employment promotion projects commissioned by the BMZ. They use different strategic approaches and measures, depending on the national context, culture, environment, societal characteristics etc.

The projects were:

BANGLADESH: PROMOTION OF SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS IN THE INDUSTRY PSES (2010-2020)

TOGO: PROMOTING VOCATIONAL TRAINING AND YOUTH EMPLOYMENT (2012 TO 2018)

INDONESIA: SOCIAL PROTECTION PROGRAMME SPP (2016 – 2018) 

RWANDA: PROMOTION OF ECONOMY AND EMPLOYMENT ECO-EMPLOI (2016 – 2019)

NAMIBIA: PROMOTION OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING (2012 – 2017)

This report provides a summary of key findings of multi-purpose cash investments in multiple sectors. 

Growing attention to multi-purpose cash offers an exciting opportunity to redress a long-standing shortcoming of humanitarian response. There is a need to better understand and respond to crisis-affected people in a more holistic and coherent way, going beyond sectors to bring the emphasis back to how people live and perceive and prioritize their needs. Multi-purpose cash opens up possibilities for enhanced collaboration among technical sectors and between cash and sector experts. Sectoral expertise should be more adequately represented in multi-sectoral assessments, design, implementation and monitoring of multi-purpose cash.

The Global Protection Cluster (GPC) Protection Mainstreaming Toolkit is designed as a companion to the GPC Protection Mainstreaming Training Package.The Training Package is the starting point to understand the concept and principles of “protection mainstreaming”. The Toolkit is designed to practically assist humanitarian workers to mainstream protection at the individual programme or project level as well as at the collective strategic and coordination level. The Toolkit targets coordination structures (e.g. Clusters, Inter-Cluster Coordination Groups, and Humanitarian Country Teams) and donors by providing the tools and necessary advice to mainstream protection into their strategies and throughout the Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC). It also targets operational organisations (e.g. UN, INGOs and NNGOs), with the tools to mainstream protection into their organisational procedures and programmes. Finally, the Toolkit allows humanitarian workers to monitor and evaluate the process and the impact of having mainstreamed protection on the affected population.

Children with disabilities experience very high levels of violence, according to this research from Plan International and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The new study carried out in Uganda and Malawi provides valuable insights into the lives of children with disabilities. Key findings include: 

- Girls and boys with disabilities experience extremely high levels of violence: 84% of children with disabilities surveyed reported having experienced some form of violence at school in the previous week.
- Girls with disabilities were more likely to report emotional and sexual violence than girls without disabilities.
- Children with disabilities find it difficult to access community-based child protection mechanisms, due to a range of barriers including environmental barriers, social barriers and institutional barriers.

This extremely important piece of research shows that if we don’t explicitly include, we exclude. In line with the aspiration of the Sustainable Development Goals to “leave no one behind” and with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, we therefore call upon Plan International and all other development actors to work together to stop the widespread violence against boys and girls with disabilities, and take concrete steps to include them in child protection mechanisms.