Background
Effective health emergency management achieves protection of those at-risk or directly affected. Under HEPR, community protection refers to community centered actions that protect those who are at risk or affected from the health and social impacts of the health emergency. Therefore, Community protection puts an emphasis on equity and accountability and the need to make a conscious effort to protect the health and social needs, well-being, and livelihoods of those at-risk or affected. Effectively enabling community protection requires that the policies and practices regarding how population and environmental interventions are implemented account for these diverse impacts in order to avoid reinforcing inequities and inadvertently causing harm to the very individuals they aim to protect. Within the community protection objectives, a whole-of-government, multisectoral and multi-partnership approach aims at ensuring a whole-of-society response mitigating any avoidable harm from the response. This includes strengthening social protection policies and programs to secure basic income for material needs, including food security, and protect livelihoods. Such a holistic approach to emergency management further includes ensuring business continuity for economic stability, maintaining the continuity of education and learning, Continuity of community services, and recognizing and responding to indirect health and mental health impacts by incorporating strategies that address the broader health and social consequences of emergencies.
This webinar gives an overview over community social protection, and highlights examples from the field where this is successfully implemented in the African and European region- in outbreaks and conflict, displacement and among host communities. The involvement of health, education, protection, livelihoods and food security is highlighted, as well as a multi-stakeholder cash assistance scheme to assist vulnerable and conflict affected populations that allows the continuity of essential health services in hard to reach areas.
Objectives
- Illustrate, using concrete examples from the field, how to move towards operationalizing multisectoral response approaches for community social protection, putting communities at the centre.
- Create awareness on the the concept, stakeholders and practice of community social protection and how these play out in conjunction with other health response areas
- Create awareness among health and emergency response and preparedness practitioners towards other sectors involved apart from the health sector in applying the social determinants of health
- Discuss gaps and support needs that will enable the community social protection concept to be developed to scale
Tentative Agenda and Speakers
Welcome remarks: Dr Stella Chungong, Director, Health Security Preparedness (HSP) department, WHE, WHO headquarters
Overview of Community Social protection, what do we do: key interventions; different settings, examples:
Dr Adelheid Marschang, Senior Emergency Officer, Community Protection and Resilience unit, WHE, WHO headquarters
Examples of UNICEF interventions: implementation challenges: Ms Sarah Karmin, Programme Specialist, UNICEF
Panel discussion
Voices from the field: Community social protection in action - what is still needed?
- Child protection across different crisis settings: Mr Yann Grandin, Child Protection Specialist, UNICEF
- Multisectoral cash assistance for conflict affected vulnerable populations in Ukraine: Dr Amah Penn, Health Cluster Coordinator, WHO Ukraine
Placing community social protection the context of community protection and resilience in health emergencies: Kai von Harbou, Unit Head, Community protection and Resilience, WHE, WHO headquarters
Q&A
Closing remarks and next steps: EPI-WIN Science and Knowledge Translation, WHO
Registration: