The Child Protection Monitoring and Evaluation Reference Group (CP MERG), the CPC Learning Network and the Community Child Protection Exchange hosted a webinar on October 15th, 2014 at 9am EST to discuss the Sierra Leone T2 Follow-Up Study on supporting a community-led intervention to reduce teenage pregnancy.

Dr. Lindsay Stark, director of the CPC Learning Network and lead methodologist in developing this survey to measure children’s well-being, presented the process of designing the measurement tool as well what we are learning at the second data collection point (T2), nearly a year after implementation began. Sarah Lilley, deputy head of child protection at Save the Children UK and coordinator of the Community Child Protection Exchange, served as a respondent.

A short background article about the Sierra Leone work and the full accompanying reports can be found here.

About the presenters:
Lindsay Stark is an Associate Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health in Columbia University’s Program on Forced Migration and Health. She has over a decade of experience leading applied research on protection of women and children in humanitarian settings. Prof. Stark ‘s particular area of expertise is measuring sensitive and difficult-to-measure social phenomenon. Prof. Stark has led assessment and evaluation projects in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. She has also helped pioneer the development of new methodologies such as the Neighborhood Method to assess incidence of human rights violations, a Participatory Ranking Method that has been included in a number of toolkits. Dr. Stark previously served as the Director of Research and Curriculum at the Center on Child Protection, a teaching and research center jointly established by Columbia University, the University of Indonesia, UNICEF and the Government of Indonesia.

Sarah Lilley is currently the deputy head of children protection at Save the Children UK. She is also the Coordinator of the Interagency Learning Initiative on community-based child protection mechanisms and child protection systems and has been working with Lindsay on the Sierra Leone research.Prior to this she was the child protection learning and impact assessment adviser at Save the Children UK. Sarah has also worked as an economist for the UK government, focusing on monitoring and evaluation of national child protection and education policy and interventions. Prior to this Sarah worked as a research assistant for a Commonwealth development organisation.