Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Across conflict zones, from protracted insurgency in Northern Nigeria to interstate war in Ukraine, children absorb the costs of instability. Schools collapse. Families fracture. Displacement becomes prolonged. Protection systems strain. Yet public discourse often highlights children's adaptability rather than the structural failures requiring them to adapt.

This blog argues that resilience must not become a substitute for protection. I examine child protection in conflict-affected Northern Nigeria and compare it with the ongoing war in Ukraine. While contexts differ dramatically in state capacity and international response, a shared lesson emerges: resilience is relational and structural—not heroic endurance.

Children should not have to be extraordinary to survive.

Disrupted Childhoods: Conflict and Ecological Breakdown

Northern Nigeria: Protracted Insecurity

Since 2009, the Boko Haram insurgency and its splinter groups have destabilized northeastern Nigeria. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), over 8 million people in the region require humanitarian assistance, many of them children.

Children face layered vulnerabilities:

• Abduction and the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict—classified as grave violations—have been documented in UN reporting.
• Attacks on schools reported by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.
• Early marriage and child labor as coping strategies identified by UNICEF Nigeria.
• Chronic psychosocial trauma linked to prolonged insecurity.
  

Nigeria endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration, committing to protect education during armed conflict. Yet implementation remains uneven in insecure areas, as evidenced by repeated kidnappings and attacks on schools across the region.

Funding gaps persist. The Nigeria Humanitarian Response Plan is frequently underfunded, leaving child protection and education services fragile and donor-dependent. As bilateral funding declines and multilateral institutions strain, prevention programming becomes increasingly unstable.

Ukraine: Interstate War and Institutional Strain

Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, millions of Ukrainian children have been displaced internally and across borders, according to UNICEF Ukraine.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documents civilian harm and damage to schools and hospitals. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants related to the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children.

Ukraine entered the war with comparatively stronger social service systems and education infrastructure than Nigeria. Yet rapid displacement strains even these institutions. Children attend online classes from bomb shelters. Families are separated across borders. Russian occupation of certain territories further complicates child tracing, reunification, and service continuity.

Despite different conflict dynamics, both contexts reveal social ecological breakdown.

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model reminds us that children develop within nested systems—family, school, community, and state. In both Nigeria and Ukraine, multiple layers of this ecology are destabilized simultaneously.

What Research Shows: Trauma Is Cumulative

The Harvard Center on the Developing Child defines "toxic stress" as prolonged activation of stress response systems in the absence of buffering adult relationships. Shonkoff et al. (2012) demonstrate that chronic adversity without protective relationships impairs cognitive and emotional development.

Charlson et al. (2019) estimate elevated prevalence of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in conflict-affected populations.

Resilience, therefore, is not innate toughness. It emerges from:

• Stable caregiving relationships​
• Predictable environments
• Community belonging
• Institutional responsiveness
  

When protective systems collapse, adaptation often involves emotional numbing, hypervigilance, and suppressed aspirations.

We must ask: Are children resilient—or are they just surviving structurally unsafe environments?

Policy Commitments: Protection on Paper

Nigeria's Child Rights Act (2003) nationally codified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet several northern states have not fully implemented it. The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child reinforces regional obligations.

In Ukraine, child protection obligations are grounded in international humanitarian law and European frameworks. International Criminal Court (ICC) engagement underscores legal accountability.

Yet policy architecture does not guarantee practice.

In Nigeria and Ukraine, humanitarian responses often remain short-term and donor-dependent. Psychosocial programs operate in funding cycles rather than developmental timelines.

In Ukraine, stronger institutions mitigate some risks, yet displacement across borders and territorial occupation complicate continuity of care and monitoring.

The implementation gap—not the absence of policy—remains central.

Lived Experience: Families Holding the Line

In an interview, Aisha, a child protection officer in Borno State, described resilience as survival: "Families are holding everything together with almost nothing. Mothers skip meals so children can eat. Fathers walk for hours for daily labor. Children act older than their age."

She also warned that humanitarian needs persist long after international attention fades.

"When donors leave, the needs don't leave,” she said. “The trauma doesn't leave. The pressure on families doesn't leave.”

Her observation aligns with global evidence. Research supported by the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice demonstrates that predictable cash transfers reduce child labor and delay early marriage.

Families are the primary protective system. When economic and psychosocial strain overwhelms them, children's vulnerability multiplies.

This reality is not unique to Nigeria. At a Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues’ event on truth-telling and child rights in conflict, Ukrainian voices described strikingly similar dynamics—families absorbing institutional failures, mothers navigating displacement without income support, and children assuming adult responsibilities in the absence of functioning protective systems. The geography differs; the structural logic does not.

Gendered Vulnerabilities

Conflict reshapes childhood differently for girls and boys.

In northeastern Nigeria, girls face abduction, early marriage, and stigma upon reintegration. Boys face forced recruitment and suspicion of insurgent affiliation.

In Ukraine, girls face trafficking risks during cross-border displacement. Boys confront militarization pressures and future conscription anxieties.

Gender-responsive guidance exists. The IASC Gender Handbook and the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action outline operational approaches for differentiated risks.

A generic resilience narrative obscures these distinct harms.

The Risk of Romanticizing Resilience

Resilience centers agency. It avoids reducing children to passive victims. But resilience becomes dangerous when it substitutes reform.

If children are resilient, why invest in systemic transformation?
If communities cope, why expand social protection?
If youth adapt, why address root causes?

Resilience should describe the outcome of effective systems—not compensate for their absence.

From Reaction to Structural Prevention

In northern Nigeria—and so many conflict-affected states—child protection systems activate only after harm has already occurred. A school is bombed. A child is displaced. A family fractures under economic strain. Services scramble into motion. Emergency appeals are launched.

But by then, prevention has already failed.

A reframed protection agenda must prioritize prevention and system-building. Prevention is infrastructure.

In Beyond Survival: The Case for Investing in Young Children Globally, the collaborative’s Executive Director Gillian Huebner argues that investing in young children is not only morally imperative but economically strategic. Early investment strengthens societal resilience and reduces long-term social costs. The evidence is clear: prevention does not simply reduce suffering—it builds stability. It strengthens the foundations upon which peaceful societies depend.

To move from reactive response to structural prevention, six pillars require urgent attention:

1. Expand Family-Based Social Protection

Predictable income support reduces harmful coping mechanisms. When families lack stable income, impossible choices emerge—early marriage to reduce household burden, child labor to supplement lost wages, unsafe migration in search of opportunity. The World Bank and UNICEF support scaling adaptive social protection systems in fragile settings. These systems allow governments to expand assistance rapidly during crises, cushioning shocks before they cascade into irreversible harm.

Prevention begins in the household.

2. Institutionalize Trauma-Informed Services

Conflict leaves wounds that are not always visible. Trauma shapes how children learn, relate, and imagine their futures. Untreated, it can harden into cycles of violence, disengagement, and instability. The World Health Organization’s Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) provides a scalable model for integrating mental health into primary care systems, bringing psychosocial support into routine service delivery rather than isolating it within specialized facilities.

If we fail to address trauma early, we build systems on fractured foundations.

3. Secure Education as Protective Infrastructure

Schools are more than sites of instruction. They are protective spaces. They provide routine, adult supervision, social connection, and a sense of normalcy amid chaos. The Safe Schools Declaration and research from the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack offer guidance on safeguarding schools during conflict and ensuring continuity of learning.

When schools close, protection collapses quietly. The absence is not immediately visible, but its effects echo for decades.

4. Strengthen Reintegration Systems

Children formerly associated with armed forces or groups require structured reintegration pathways that extend beyond symbolic demobilization. Without sustained support—family tracing, psychosocial care, and community reconciliation—reintegration falters. The Paris Principles outline standards for reintegrating children associated with armed forces or groups. Yet too often, reintegration programs are short-term and underfunded.

Reintegration is not a project. It is a process. And processes require institutions.

5. Invest in State Capacity

Data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)'s Financial Tracking Service reveal chronic underfunding of child protection sectors in protracted crises. Humanitarian funding remains reactive, short-term, and politically contingent.

Without sustained funding and institutional reinforcement, prevention collapses into repetitive emergency cycles. Systems remain fragile. Gains evaporate. Children pay the price.

Prevention requires durable institutions—registries that function, social workers who are paid consistently, data systems that inform policy, and budgets that extend beyond annual appeals.

6. Align Child Protection with Political Economy Reform

Child protection does not operate outside the political economy. Weak fiscal social contracts, fragmented service delivery, corruption, and elite capture quietly undermine prevention efforts long before crises erupt. As the World Bank notes in World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law, policy effectiveness depends not only on technical design but on the power and incentives shaping institutions. When child protection is treated as a humanitarian silo rather than a governance priority, it remains vulnerable to political shifts and funding volatility.

Prevention is not only technical. It is political.

The Financing Reality

Today's global financing landscape poses a pressing challenge. Major bilateral donors are scaling back overseas assistance, and multilateral institutions face fiscal and political strain. The long-standing reliance on humanitarian funding is increasingly unstable.

Child protection systems cannot be sustained through short-term emergency appeals alone.

National governments must step forward—not only as implementers of donor-funded programs, but as primary stewards of child protection systems. This requires embedding child protection within national budgets, strengthening domestic social protection registries, investing in interoperable data systems, and integrating psychosocial and education safeguards into core public service delivery.

Where conflict persists, governments must work with regional institutions, development banks, and local civil society to move from reactive crisis management to institutionalized prevention.

Without national ownership, resilience will continue to depend on external cycles of attention and funding rather than durable systems of protection.

And without durable systems of protection, children will continue to inherit crises they did not create.

A Comparative Insight

Ukraine has mobilized rapid international legal and financial support. Nigeria's protracted insurgency receives intermittent attention.

Yet children in both contexts experience social-ecological disruption.

Resilience is ecological.

Children thrive when surrounded by stable caregivers, functioning schools, accountable governance, and predictable futures. Absent these, resilience becomes endurance.

Conclusion: Protection Before Praise

Children in northern Nigeria and Ukraine demonstrate extraordinary strength.

But hope is not policy. Strength is not a system. Survival is not resilience.

Resilience should mean children flourish because protective structures are intact, and not because they endure their absence.

Rethinking child protection in conflict requires shifting from celebrating survival to building systems robust enough that survival is not the benchmark.

Children should not have to prove their resilience. They deserve protection strong enough that resilience becomes an outcome—not an expectation.

Japhet Osuji (G'27) is a student fellow on Catholic approaches to children's care and protection with the Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues and a master’s student in the Global Human Development program at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.