Evaluating the impact of a community-based livelihood intervention on child protection : a mixed method approach

Globally, children face an increasing risk of harm from abuse, violence and neglect. Progress towards securing a safe environment for them is slow and uneven. There is a growing need to understand how innovative community-driven interventions could address sociocultural practices that harm children. In this paper, we evaluated the impact of the community-driven urban programme on livelihood, income fortification and socio-civic transformation intervention (UPLIFT) on child protection in Kampala, Uganda. We used a mixed-method evaluation approach, which incorporated the difference-in-difference analysis and Kernel propensity score matching to estimate the programme's impact, and for the analysis of our qualitative data, we used the thematic approach. There were 663 pre-intervention participants and 559 post-intervention participants, aged between 13 and 17 years, in the study. Results showed improvements in various aspects of child protection; for example, there was strengthened community responsibility for child protection services and uptake of policy. However, we found undesirable impacts on situations presenting a serious risk of harm to children. We argue that protecting children against harm is a complex process, often rooted in the sociocultural and religious life of communities, and that child protection interventions must be deliberate about identifying and targeting ingrained sociocultural practices that sustain child abuse.