UNICEF’s 2026–2029 blueprint: How to navigate child protection amid converging crises
With a brief note on what the new US ‘America First’ Global Health Strategy means for child protection
UNICEF’s Strategic Plan 2026–2029 was endorsed at the Executive Board’s second regular session in New York in early September 2025. It lands in a hard moment: overlapping conflicts, climate shocks and economic turbulence are eroding gains for children while international funding tightens. UNICEF has signalled the need to be leaner and more agile, but what matters for practice is the direction of travel: this plan offers the first practical compass for child protection in this climate—clear signals on systems, prevention and inclusion, and a shared frame for what to protect, at what scale, and how. Earlier in April 2025 saw the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action release Prioritising Protection of Children in a Changing Humanitarian Landscape——another sign of sector recalibration and a timely companion to UNICEF’s focus.
The context the plan is built for
UNICEF sets its strategy for a world of converging crises and constrained resources. Upholding children’s rights now requires more than incremental projects: it requires stronger national systems, credible public financing, and locally owned prevention and response that can withstand shocks. In short: fewer priorities, bigger scale, deeper systems.
What the plan is
The plan orients the whole organisation around five Impact Results to 2029—survival and development; learning and skills; freedom from poverty; protection from violence; and resilience to climate and environmental risks—delivered through a defined set of strategies: advocacy and partnerships; policy and financing; evidence; engaging families and communities and shifting social norms; strengthening basic social services; and coordinating across the humanitarian–development–peace nexus. Three ‘accelerators’ are intended to multiply results across sectors: adolescent girls; community and front-line systems; and innovation and digital transformation.
Source: UNICEF Strategic Plan 2026-2029
These are government-owned, population-level targets. UNICEF’s contribution is catalytic—through advocacy, policy and systems support, financing and partnerships—rather than direct delivery totals. While programme narratives often describe benefits for both children and their families, the numerical targets themselves are framed around children (and young people).
What’s new in this cycle
What is substantively new is three intentional shifts: a sharper focus on five outcomes; a clear orientation to scale and population reach (rather than counting activities); and differentiated programming by context. The emphasis accelerates moves from projects to systems, and from isolated activities to population-level coverage through government-led platforms and community interfaces.
Protection from violence (Impact Result 4)
Situation analysis. The plan underscores the persistence and scale of violence against children: violent punishment remains widespread; sexual violence affects both girls and boys; child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) persist; and too many children still lack legal identity. The burden is greatest for children in conflict settings, girls and children with disabilities. Displacement and migration are rising, requiring inclusion of children on the move—explicitly including unaccompanied children—within national systems. Online violence is a growing threat that demands stronger evidence, partnerships and governance.
Programme description. UNICEF will increase access to specialised social welfare and justice services; scale parenting programmes; strengthen online child protection; accelerate birth registration; and intensify action to end child marriage, FGM and gender-based violence. In humanitarian contexts, UNICEF will maintain continuity of child protection services, expand the social service workforce, and ensure survivor-centred prevention and response, including access to justice.
How change happens (programme logic). The plan champions child protection systems as the pathway to population-level results: strengthening standards, coordination and workforce; ensuring continuity, adaptability and portability of services through national systems; and embedding gender-based violence (GBV) and mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) within child protection. Prevention hinges on engaging families and communities to shift norms, reduce acceptance of violence and increase help-seeking and reporting, with aspects of child protection integrated across health, education and social protection. Foundational enablers—legal identity and responsible digital systems for case management, civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) and interoperability—improve coverage, quality and accountability. Inclusion is a constant: children facing discrimination, statelessness, conflict and displacement (including unaccompanied children) are brought into national systems rather than served at the margins.
Where ‘care and care reform’ lives in the plan
Care runs through two pillars. Under Impact Result 1 (survival, nutrition, ECD), the plan backs nurturing care, parenting support and MHPSS within resilient primary systems and safe WASH, linked to education, child protection and social protection. Under Impact Result 4 (protection from violence), care is the protective function of systems—workforce, case management, identity and access to justice—plus positive parenting, community norms, continuity in crises, and explicit pathways for children without parental care and children on the move. Taken together, these pillars describe a care continuum: prevention and family strengthening → family-based alternative care and reintegration → lived experience / survivor-centred justice and recovery.
Where Child Protection in Humanitarian Action lives in the plan
Humanitarian action is embedded across the plan including in Impact Result 4 (protection from violence). Here, UNICEF commits to keep protection services continuous, adaptable and portable in crises—sustaining case management, family tracing and reunification, MHPSS, GBV risk mitigation and response, and child-sensitive access to justice, while monitoring and responding to grave violations. The cross-cutting strategies operationalise this through coordination and harmonisation across the humanitarian–development–peace nexus, with preparedness, anticipatory action, shock-responsive social protection and predictable leadership roles to maintain essential services when systems are stressed. The accelerators reinforce delivery at scale: community and front-line systems for localisation and accountability to affected populations; adolescent girls as a priority group; and innovation/digital to enable safe case management and legal identity (CRVS) even in displacement, including for unaccompanied and separated children. Taken together, this describes a humanitarian protection pathway: risk reduction and preparedness → life-saving protection during crisis and displacement → early recovery and restoration of national systems, so children remain protected before, during and after shocks.
The challenge
UNICEF puts the SDGs front and centre and sets a bold aim: 350 million children protected from violence. The challenge is that aligning programmes to the SDGs is not the same as moving the SDG target—specifically 16.2.1, which tracks violent discipline at home. Shifting that indicator needs behaviour change at population scale. The practical way to do this is a government-owned national protection and parenting package delivered through existing platforms (health, education, social protection and community) so the same evidence-based support reaches most families—consistently, quickly and at lower cost.
What needs to be done is clear: governments need to pass and enforce a legal ban on corporal punishment; scale parenting and caregiver support (with fathers’ engagement and disability-inclusive adaptations) through routine contacts; run norms and communications that make non-violent caregiving the default; guarantee survivor-centred services (CMR, Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP), basic MHPSS, child-friendly police/justice) with simple referral maps; train and supervise front-line and para-professional workers; use interoperable case management linked to CRVS with child-data safeguards; set 16.2.1 milestones and track coverage and quality on a shared dashboard; and secure domestic budget lines (leveraging international financial institutions (IFIs) where useful) so this package endures and stays continuous across shocks and includes children on the move. In short: move from SDG alignment to indicator movement by standardising what works, delivering it at scale, and measuring it relentlessly.
Why this plan matters for the sector
The plan sets a sector playbook: pursue population-level, government-owned results; standardise and scale evidence-based prevention and survivor services through national systems; and resource community/front-line interfaces with context-specific pathways. For child protection, that means fewer projects, clearer accountability to SDG targets, and shared indicators across sectors—so limited funds translate into coverage and quality at scale.
Navigating the future
As UNICEF looks toward 2030, the Strategic Plan sets not just a direction but a challenge: to translate alignment with the SDGs into measurable progress for children. Delivering on that vision will depend on how effectively governments, partners and practitioners can prioritise, scale and sustain results. The following priorities outline what that navigation looks like in practice:
Keep the SDGs in view. Track progress against child-protection targets: 16.2 (end violence against children), 5.3 (end child marriage/FGM), 16.9 (legal identity), 8.7 (end child labour). Align country dashboards and reviews to these.
Strengthen national systems. Build standards and coordination, expand and supervise the social service workforce, make justice child-friendly, and link interoperable case management with CRVS; monitor system maturity over time.
Scale prevention. Take evidence-based parenting, nurturing care and basic MHPSS to population level via health, education and community platforms; pair with social-norms work and measure reductions in violent punishment and child marriage.
Guarantee survivor-centred services. Ensure timely access to quality health care (including CMR/PEP), MHPSS, social welfare and child-friendly police/judiciary, with safe reporting and complaints mechanisms.
Localise and finance. Resource community and front-line structures; embed child protection lines in national budgets and use IFI operations to protect social spending and include child-sensitive indicators.
Build safe digital/data and include children on the move. Modernise CRVS/case systems with child-data safeguards; ensure child-sensitive migration/asylum, guardianship and family-based alternatives; enable cross-border referrals.
Plan for continuity across the HDP nexus. Use preparedness, anticipatory action and shock-responsive social protection so services stay continuous, adaptable and portable before, during and after crises.
What efficiency really means for child protection
UNICEF’s Strategic Plan commits the organisation to operate leaner and more efficiently, with organisational adjustments designed to reduce costs and improve agility. Those efficiencies must be visible at country office level and inside every programme, including child protection. But child protection is people-centred and labour-intensive by design: front-line workers, supervisors, community actors and justice partners make protection real, and development partners help broker learning across national and sub-national systems. Simply cutting headcount is not an efficiency strategy. Working smarter with less means focus and practice: focusing on the outcomes child protection is directly accountable for, and staying close to practice—being consistently available to work with national counterparts, continually learning how protection is practised at community level, what works and what does not, and keeping communication, learning and knowledge exchange a two-way process, not one-way technical assistance.
In practical terms, efficiency comes from a few high-level choices: keep Tier-1 SDG targets at the centre (e.g., ending violence against children, child marriage/FGM, child labour. child justice and legal identity) and offer second-priority, time-bound technical contributions to outcomes led by other sectors (e.g., mental health in primary care; violence in schools) without diluting core delivery; support the relevant sectors to scale prevention through existing national platforms (health, education, social protection); standardise what works (SOPs, supervision tools, referral pathways) and stop pilot proliferation; protect and strengthen supervision and interoperable case-management/CRVS data rails with child-data safeguards; organise joint programming around a shared results frame to cut reporting burden and align incentives; and use task-sharing with clear scopes so para-professionals extend reach while qualified social workers handle complex cases. Equally important are the guardrails: do not cut front-line capacity, do not expand tech without governance, and do not allow endless pilots to substitute for population-level scale.
A brief note on the US America First global health strategy
Released in September 2025, the US Government’s ‘America First’ Global Health Strategy centres on epidemic control, rapid detection and response, and country-level delivery through bilateral compacts/agreements with partner governments. These agreements set performance benchmarks, co-financing obligations, commodity and supply-chain arrangements, and the provider mix (including expanded roles for private and faith-based organisations). Implementation then flows through grant/contract instruments with implementers and data-sharing provisions tied to strengthened surveillance systems. In practice, this means the decisive levers for protecting children will sit inside those bilateral agreements and implementing contracts—what they require, finance and measure.
Where child protection stands
There is no explicit reference to children’s protection or to violence against children in the strategy. Safeguarding obligations, survivor care and child-sensitive data protections are not specified. As written, child protection is effectively invisible within the plan’s health framework.
Where opportunities exist — and what partnerships must deliver
Because the main levers are contractual, the priority for child protection actors is to be written into the agreements. That requires deliberate collaboration between child protection and health teams (within and beyond UNICEF) and national governments.
Embed safeguarding in country agreements. Advocacy to ensure a Child Safeguarding Annex is attached to each compact, setting minimum standards (including PSEA and VAC policies), mandatory reporting lines, complaints/whistle-blower channels and consequences for non-compliance; include child-sensitive indicators in performance frameworks.
Define a minimum health–child protection service package. Require clinical management of rape (CMR), PEP, emergency contraception, STI prophylaxis, MHPSS and safe, child-friendly referral pathways to social services and justice; prohibit unnecessary residential placement and prioritise family-based care.
Make surveillance and data child-safe. Specify child-data governance (data minimisation, role-based access, audit trails, aggregate-by-default sharing); enable interoperable referrals between health information systems and protection case management using non-identifying codes; link with CRVS for legal identity.
Equip the workforce and assure quality. Build safeguarding, VAC/GBV first-line support (e.g., PFA), consent/assent and disability-inclusive practice into pre-service and in-service training; designate child protection focal points; include safeguarding checks in routine supervision and facility audits.
Protect financing and supplies. Ring-fence modest budget lines for safeguarding, survivor-care commodities (e.g., PEP kits), MHPSS, supervision and complaints mechanisms; tie part of performance payments to meeting safeguarding and survivor-care standards.
Leverage community and front-line systems. Collaborate with the faith-based sector to set clear standards for faith-based and private providers; require safe referral, family-based care commitments and visible complaints mechanisms; partner with community structures to extend reach and reinforce protective norms.
Align with national SDG priorities and national systems. Link indicators to SDG targets and channel improvements through national child protection and CRVS systems to avoid parallel, short-lived arrangements.
Framed this way, the health strategy can carry basic protections for children even without naming them—but only if child protection and health actors collaborate to develop the agreements, standards, budgets and data rules from the outset.
Acknowledgements
This blog has benefited from rich discussions within the Child Protection Working Group of HDPI, Inc (humanitarian development partners initiative)—a global think tank and network committed to advancing child protection, care and broader humanitarian objectives. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the position of any institution or organisation.
I utilised OpenAI’s ChatGPT to assist in organising the research and drafting portions of this blog post. Any errors or omissions are entirely my responsibility.
