Community dialogues as a strategy for identifying and addressing child protection needs in Shinyanga, Tanzania

Developmental science is both concerned with and has accumulated a wealth of evidence around factors that support and harm child development – many of which overlap substantially with the recently agreed upon global Sustainable Development Goals, placing developmental scientists in an apt position to contribute to the realization of these goals and targets. We present community dialogues as a participatory research and program development strategy through which developmental scientists and local community partners can collaboratively surface, discuss, address, and evaluate child protection and well-being issues in their communities. We detail our experience with a case study from Shinyanga, Tanzania, in which community-based organizations worked with adults and children to collaboratively surface and discuss child protection issues in their communities. We sought to understand …