Joining Forces
Ending Violence Against Children
What is the Quick-Start Guide
National commitments in countries eager to end violence against children (EVAC) have grown rapidly since the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. Increasing efforts have been made to confront the pandemic of violence against children in a focused and coordinated way. To solidify and accelerate this momentum, six of the world’s largest international organizations have come together in the partnership known as Joining Forces. The daily work of Joining Forces partners is to develop, test and implement prevention and response initiatives to end violence against children in partnership with local communities, organizations and governments.
This Quick Start Guide to the Adaptation and Scale Up of Programmes will help partners incorporate a “beginning with the end in mind” mindset, to consider adaptation and scale up principles throughout their work. This guide will help Joining Forces partners select promising, scalable interventions and understand what to adapt and maintain, as well as apply adaptive management techniques to implement, monitor and evaluate their efforts.
A unique value of this guide is to help Joining Forces partners coordinate with each other in the scale up process, while systematically keeping children’s voices and participation at the core. As Joining Forces’ theory of change highlights, children are not only most affected by exclusion and violence, but are also critical to redressing this situation. Throughout the development of adaptation and scale processes, the inclusion of children’s participation and guidance is critical to ensuring that scaled interventions/activities are meaningful and sustainable.
The guide builds on the understanding that adapting interventions for new and changing contexts drives scale and it provides a set of priority tools for carefully adapting interventions, while retaining core mechanisms that make them successful. Application of this guide will help to set a vision and chart a course among partners for selecting and scaling proven interventions.
Who is the guide intended for ?
We hope that this guide will be useful to staff throughout Joining Forces’ member agencies by ensuring that key principles in adaptation and scale are understood and made practical. As a “quick-start” guide, this resource and the tools it contains are not intended to provide a comprehensive set of one-size-fits-all answers — as we know, the process of scale-up will and must look different in every context depending on innumerable variables.
How to use the guide
The Quick-Start Guide divides nine tools into three phases that are roughly chronological in their order of use. The first set of tools focuses on selecting an intervention or activity that the local Joining Forces team thinks is a successful candidate for scale up (tools #1, #2, #3, and #4). The second set of tools support the development and tracking of a scale-up strategy (tools #5, #6 and #7) and the final section offers a single tool (#9) that offers a means of documenting and disseminating lessons learned. This is a rough order of tool use and the overarching principle all users should follow in using this guide is: DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOUR TEAM IN YOUR CONTEXT.
Who developed the guide
This Quick-Start Guide was produced under the direction of the Joining Forces Secretariat. Members of the Secretariat and also a technical reference group made up of expert representatives of the six Joining Forces member agencies. They contributed both to the original design of the Guide and provided ongoing feedback during its development. The tool was also drafted with testing and inputs by members of the Joining Forces country platforms, this included colleagues from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The guide was written by Joseph Petraglia of Syntegral and Rebecka Lundgren of the University of California at San Diego. In creating this guide focusing on the unique needs of Joining Forces, Joseph and Rebecka drew from a larger set of adaptation and scale-up tools they adapted or developed for the INSPIRE Framework spearheaded by WHO, UNICEF, End Violence Against Children Partnership, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Joining Forces is an alliance of the 6 largest child-focused international NGOs
