Guide for including Children

Step-by-step guide for involving children in disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities

Are you considering involving children in your work related to disaster risk reduction (DRR)? Perfect! Then this guide is for you. The following page is a step-by-step guide that will assist you in this work. 

This guide has ten steps that will both prepare you to involve children and assist you once you have involved them in your work. If you click on a step, you will see a breakdown into smaller parts. The smaller parts, we call them “sub-steps”, help you to think and break down the steps into more manageable parts. These sub-steps consist of guiding questions. You can think of these questions as a checklist that tells you what you need to do to complete each step. For some of the stages, you will also find good practice examples and tools. The examples are there to inspire you! They will demonstrate how other people have worked with child participation in ingenious ways. The tools are there to help you to address the guiding questions.

We recommend going through this guide in chronological order. If you already know the answers to the guiding questions for a sub-step, that’s great! There is no need to answer them again, but they can serve as a good reminder to ensure you haven’t missed anything vital.

Before we let you enter this guide, we would like to emphasise a crucial point. When it comes to child participation, it is so easy to think of it from a top-down perspective, especially when it comes to crisis and disaster: An adult wants to include children in a pre-defined topic in a way that they have already decided (for example, informing them in schools). We would like you to challenge this dogmatic idea. Try to consider ways children can co-create activities, and how children can decide on what and how they would prefer to be involved. We fully understand that different activities might allow for different degrees of co-creation. But remember: Meaningful participation entails letting children have a say in all stages. Think about this when going through the guide!

Lastly, if you are unable to address a specific question – no worries! There will be no quiz. Address the questions to the best of your ability.

Thank you for consulting this guide! We hope that you have found it useful. From our side, there is only one last thing that we would like to say: Good luck with your work!

Disclaimer:

This step-by-step guide was created in June 2024 under the “Secure Kids” project in a web-based format. The guide was translated into several languages. The translations were based on and finalised as per June 2024 version. You will find all the crucial information in your translation; however, some additional resources or examples might have been added to the website since.

This step-by-step guide expands on the mechanism for involving children in DRR. You can read the mechanism here.