Supervision and Monitoring in Informal Child Protection in Rural Context

Like in most African countries, community leaders (including clan and family heads) in rural communities in Ghana undertake core child protection duties, including facilitating kinship placements, resolution of child maltreatment and trafficking issues, and spearheading community-wide education programmes. The child protection activities carried out by community leaders are legitimized and sanctioned in the child welfare legislation of African countries, such as the Child and Family Welfare Policy in Ghana. As the role of the community leaders is being regularized and legitimized in most African countries, it has become necessary to understand how the child protection activities of these community leaders are supervised, regulated, and monitored by professional child protection workers. Through in-depth narrative interviews with 12 community leaders in two rural communities in Ghana, this study explored community leaders' motivations for undertaking child protection practices, and how their child protection activities are supervised and monitored by professional child protection workers. The findings revealed child protection workers utilize training of trainers' programmes, and stakeholder policy engagements as supervision mechanisms to monitor the child protection duties of the community leaders. The study findings highlight key gaps in the monitoring and supervision duties performed by professional child protection workers, including (1) the lack of coordinated structure and framework for monitoring, and (2) the limited focus on outcome in monitoring. Implications for child protection practice have been discussed.