Communities can name the danger. Can the system respond?

Between October 2024 and August 2025 realife Learning was contracted by Oxfam Consults to conduct a learning review of Oxfam America’s Raising the Alarm on Protection Crises initiative. Oxfam committed to undertake six in-depth and wide-reaching protection analyses in situations that featured elevated risks to civilians for advocacy to influential stakeholders including the United Nations. These were undertaken in Burkina Faso, Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lebanon, South Sudan, and Venezuela. However, due to contextual constraints, in-depth data collection in CAR and DRC was limited. A multi-case study approach, guided by the Value Creation Framework (VCF), examined country-specific experiences through 17 interviews and seven focus group discussions. The approach explored how internal and external enablers and constraints influenced intended and unintended value creation and captured stakeholders-defined outcomes beyond the initial project design, particularly relevant for the advocacy component.

What’s shifting / shifted in our work?

One shift that became visible through this process is a growing recognition that protection analysis is most meaningful when it is rooted in community participation. In several countries, the process of jointly identifying risks and discussing them openly created spaces where communities could articulate issues that might otherwise remain unspoken.

Another shift is internal. Many country teams and partners began to see community-led protection not simply as a methodology for this project, but as an approach that could inform other areas of programming. In some places, teams have already started adapting the tools for other assessments or incorporating the findings into new programme design.

At the same time, the review surfaced a tension between locally grounded protection work and global advocacy ambitions. While the community processes were often strong and empowering, connecting those insights to national or international advocacy proved more difficult in practice due to contesting priorities and global development shifts.

What are we learning?

Our experience indicates that learning reviews are frequently treated as post-project exercises. This approach presents a significant challenge: key stakeholders, who possess critical insights into the project, may have disengaged or moved on by the time the review occurs and organisations often need to allocate specific budgets to secure their participation. Embedding learning reviews throughout the project lifecycle mitigates these issues, allowing stakeholders to contribute while their experiences and observations are still fresh, ensuring more accurate, actionable insights.

One of the clearest lessons from this work is that the process itself created value, not just the protection analysis reports. The participatory discussions helped communities recognize shared risks, strengthened relationships between community members and partners, and in some cases encouraged collective problem-solving.

We also saw that local partnerships were central to making the work meaningful. Partners brought contextual understanding, credibility, and relationships that enabled deeper engagement with communities. What stood out throughout the review is how strongly the work centered on communities as analysts of their own protection environments, rather than simply sources of information. Local partners, community committees, and enumerators helped shape the process—from identifying protection threats to validating findings and developing local action plans.

At the same time, the review highlighted the difficulty of linking community-driven insights with higher-level advocacy processes. Protection analysis was sometimes completed without early engagement from advocacy teams, which made it harder to align the findings with strategic influencing opportunities later on.The review itself used a reflective approach that focused less on measuring outputs and more on understanding what kinds of value were created through the process, who experienced that value, and what conditions made it possible.

What question is with us right now?

A question that keeps coming up through this reflection is:

How do we bridge the space between community-led protection work and the systems-level advocacy that is needed to address many protection risks?

Communities were able to identify threats and propose practical responses within their own environments. But many of those risks are rooted in broader political, institutional, or structural dynamics that communities alone cannot change.

This raises further questions for us:

• How can advocacy thinking be integrated earlier into community protection processes?

• What kinds of collaboration between protection and advocacy teams would make those connections more natural?

• And how do we sustain community-led approaches once a specific project ends?

  
  

Are these some of the questions that have emerged from your work, and how have you addressed them? These questions remain open and continue to inform our thinking for our current work on safeguarding, protection and care? We would greatly welcome any insights or suggestions based on your experiences.