Refugee communities are in a more accurate position to know the threats they face and are familiar with the causes of those threats and can help humanitarian organizations in addressing them. It is therefore important that humanitarian organizations actively listen and understand the concerns of the communities, to ensure that their interventions do not leave individuals and communities worse off. Protection concerns often revolve around violence in the communities, exclusion of certain groups from the communities based on gender, ethnicity, religion, poverty, discrimination and criminal behaviour. It is vital to understand the problems around protection but it is more important to critically examine the communities, recognizing the threats and harms that come from within and how they can be mitigated.

Community-based protection (CBP) puts the capacities, agency, rights and dignity of persons of concern at the centre of programming. It generates more effective and sustainable protection outcomes by strengthening local resources and capacity and identifying protection gaps through consultation.

Inspire Pakistan is the implementing partner of the community-based protection component for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The non-profit organization is involved in implementing CBP for selected areas in Punjab, ICT and Sindh. The community-based protection aims to empower, strengthen the capacity and resilience of refugees and asylum seekers living in Pakistan and enable them to counter the protection risks that they face. The CBP aims to respond to the protection and assistance needs of the refugees in different contexts and seeks to build on the skills and knowledge of the wider community, which in turn feeds into an effective humanitarian aid response.