Beyond Access: Education, Child Protection, and Minimum Protective Function in Sudan’s War

Beyond Access: Education, Child Protection, and Minimum Protective Function in Sudan’s War | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Beyond Access: Education, Child Protection, and Minimum Protective Function in Sudan’s War Mohamed Musa This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-9540589/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Sudan’s war is not only a crisis of unmet need but a crisis of institutional erosion in which the minimum protective functions connecting education, child protection, referral, coordination, and public duty-bearing are progressively stripped away. This article argues that access-centred humanitarian response, while necessary, is insufficient where fragmented service continuity coexists with the collapse of the structures that make services protective over time. To address this problem, the article proposes systems protection as a bounded analytic lens for identifying and preserving minimum protective function in contexts where systems strengthening and resilience agendas are not yet operationally attainable. Methodologically, the article uses a critical practitioner policy analysis with documentary triangulation, drawing on OCHA’s Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026, UNHCR displacement reporting, IPC food insecurity analysis, and relevant scholarship on education in emergencies, psychosocial support, humanitarian governance, localization, and systems in fragile settings. The article makes three contributions. Conceptually, it distinguishes systems protection from systems strengthening and resilience by focusing on threshold preservation under active institutional erosion. Empirically, it shows how Sudan’s war has produced partial service continuity alongside deeper protective-system fragmentation. Policy-wise, it offers a practical monitoring framework through which agencies can assess whether minimum protective function is intact, degraded, or collapsed without creating substantial additional reporting burden. In practical terms, the framework is intended to help agencies identify when service continuity no longer corresponds to protective continuity. Sudan education in emergencies child protection systems protection minimum protective function localization humanitarian governance 1. Introduction Humanitarian response in protracted war often generates a deceptive appearance of continuity. Learning spaces may reopen, referral pathways may be announced, psychosocial activities may be delivered, and attendance may be reported, yet the institutional and social structures that make such interventions protective can continue to deteriorate beneath the surface. In such situations, the presence of services does not necessarily indicate the presence of protection. Outputs remain visible while the architecture that gives those outputs meaning, safety, and durability continues to erode. Sudan offers a stark case of this problem. Humanitarian planning for 2026 identifies 33.7 million people in need of assistance, the highest number globally, while displacement has affected roughly one in four Sudanese, with large-scale repeated movement both within and beyond the country (OCHA 2026a; OCHA 2026b; UNHCR 2026). The crisis is also marked by acute food insecurity, attacks on civilian infrastructure, severe protection violations, and major funding cuts that have forced a shift toward a basic survival package for those in greatest need (IPC 2025; OCHA 2026a). These conditions matter not only because they indicate scale. They matter because they reveal the environments in which children’s learning, safety, and developmental continuity are being reorganized through institutional erosion. Children are central to this crisis, but the point is not simply that children are vulnerable. Children’s exposure to harm is structured by the quality of the institutions, relationships, and routines through which they are made visible, supported, and protected. OCHA’s 2026 planning materials describe widespread child protection risks in Sudan, including family separation, exploitation, exclusion from services, and significant psychosocial distress; in the 2025 multisector needs assessment, more than half of households reported at least one child showing signs of psychosocial distress in the previous three months (OCHA 2026b). This does not reduce children to passive recipients of harm. It highlights that children’s agency is exercised within settings whose protective conditions are being actively dismantled. Existing humanitarian analysis does not fully capture this problem. Education in emergencies scholarship has moved beyond a narrow concern with school access to consider continuity, quality, teacher support, and well-being. Child protection and psychosocial support scholarship has increasingly emphasized layered harms, embedded support structures, and the centrality of schools, families, and communities for referral and psychosocial stability (Burde et al. 2017; Kamali et al. 2020; Arega 2023; Yu et al. 2023). Yet education and child protection are still frequently operationalized as parallel sectors, while the interdependence of their minimum protective functions under conditions of active institutional erosion remains under-theorized. Part of the problem lies in the way humanitarian success is narrated. In high-pressure emergency environments, agencies and donors need rapid metrics that can travel across clusters, pooled funds, and headquarters dashboards. Numbers of children reached, schools supported, or psychosocial sessions conducted therefore become not only technical measures but also political signals of relevance, urgency, and effectiveness. These indicators matter, but they can obscure whether the deeper functions that enable protection—feedback loops, trusted adult relationships, records continuity, institutional duty-bearing, and minimally stable coordination—are holding or disappearing. Sudan brings this distortion into unusually sharp relief because service restoration and institutional fragmentation are unfolding simultaneously and unevenly across the country. This article defines systems protection at the outset as the preservation of minimum protective function during active violence or acute institutional erosion, before strengthening or transformation are realistically possible. The article argues that Sudan’s war exposes not simply the insufficiency of access-centred humanitarian response, but the dangers of restoring fragmented services while allowing the minimum protective functions that connect education, referral, public duty-bearing, and local legitimacy to continue collapsing. Systems protection is therefore proposed as a bounded analytic lens for identifying and preserving minimum protective function in contexts where longer-term systems strengthening and resilience agendas are not yet operationally attainable. The article makes three contributions. First, it offers conceptual clarification. Systems strengthening seeks to improve system performance over time, while resilience refers to a system’s capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform under stress. Systems protection, by contrast, concerns threshold preservation under active erosion (Truppa et al. 2024; Truppa et al. 2026). Second, it advances an empirical argument: Sudan reveals a distinct condition in which partial service continuity coexists with deeper protective-system fragmentation. Third, it advances a policy argument: agencies should monitor and preserve minimum protective function rather than treat service coverage alone as a sufficient proxy for protection. Methodologically, the article uses a critical practitioner policy analysis with documentary triangulation. It does not claim to offer a phenomenology of children’s lived experience, nor to substitute structural analysis for children’s voices. Rather, it examines the governance conditions under which education and child protection systems retain or lose minimum protective function in war, drawing on public humanitarian documentation and reflexive professional knowledge treated as evidence to be scrutinized rather than authority to be assumed. The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 positions Sudan as a critical case of protective-system fragmentation. Section 3 reviews the literature and identifies the gap to which this article responds. Section 4 defines systems protection as the preservation of minimum protective function, justifies the five dimensions used in the framework, and adds a diagnostic matrix that operationalizes the concept. Section 5 outlines the methodological design, documentary biases, positionality, and ethical limits of the study. Section 6 presents the findings, with particular attention to operational mechanisms of fragmentation and counterarguments. Section 7 translates the argument into a practical monitoring framework that agencies could embed in existing coordination processes. Section 8 concludes and identifies future research priorities. 2. Sudan as a critical case of protective-system fragmentation Sudan should be understood not only as a humanitarian emergency of exceptional severity, but also as a case of protective-system fragmentation under conditions of territorial and institutional reordering. OCHA’s 2026 planning documents portray a context shaped by mass displacement, attacks on schools and health facilities, economic collapse, explosive remnants of war, disrupted communications, serious protection violations, and sharply reduced humanitarian assistance due to funding cuts (OCHA 2026a; OCHA 2026b). What is at stake in such a setting is not only whether services can be delivered, but whether the minimum functions that make those services protective can still be sustained. Displacement is central to this problem. UNHCR reports that since April 2023 around 14 million people have been forced to flee, including roughly 9 million internally displaced and 4.4 million displaced across borders (UNHCR 2026). Displacement is not merely demographic. It is institutional. Teachers, ministry staff, para-social workers, community protection volunteers, and caregivers are dispersed across geographies with uneven security and service conditions. Administrative memory is interrupted, referral links are broken, and the relational trust through which children are identified, monitored, and supported is weakened. Repeated displacement deepens these effects by preventing the reconstitution of stable local arrangements. The political geography of the war reinforces these patterns. OCHA notes that while some frontlines subsided in parts of Khartoum and Aj Jazirah, hostilities intensified in much of Darfur and Kordofan, producing a landscape of uneven returns, continued siege, and severe protection risk (OCHA 2026b). This asymmetry matters for systems analysis because it prevents neat distinctions between collapse and recovery. In some places children return to areas where schools, records, staffing, and services have been devastated; in others, communities continue to absorb new arrivals while their own social infrastructure is stretched beyond capacity. Protective systems are therefore fragmented not only across sectors but across space, with children encountering radically different combinations of risk, visibility, and support depending on where movement and conflict dynamics place them. The destruction and disruption of civilian infrastructure further intensify systemic erosion. OCHA documents shelling, drone attacks, and airstrikes affecting schools, health facilities, water systems, markets, and other civilian infrastructure, alongside electricity blackouts, communication outages, and landmine contamination (OCHA 2026b). These are not merely contextual obstacles to programming. They are direct drivers of protective-system fragmentation. A school is not only a building for instruction; it is a site of routine, visibility, psychosocial anchoring, and referral. Communication systems are not only logistical tools; they sustain follow-up, case management, coordination, and continuity of care. When such infrastructures are damaged or inaccessible, protective functions weaken even where some services continue. Child protection harms in Sudan must therefore be read structurally. OCHA describes heightened risks of abuse, exploitation, neglect, family separation, psychosocial harm, and exclusion from essential services, alongside grave violations including sexual violence, abduction, and forced recruitment (OCHA 2026b). These harms do not emerge only from the presence of violence. They are amplified by the deterioration of the social and institutional environments through which children are ordinarily safeguarded. When families are dispersed, schools close or are repurposed, social workers are displaced, and formal authorities lose presence or legitimacy, children’s exposure to harm becomes more difficult to detect, prevent, and respond to. Sudan is analytically distinctive because it demonstrates the dangers of partial service continuity amid broader protective-system fragmentation. Humanitarian actors may be able to establish temporary learning spaces, distribute educational materials, support frontline staff, or deliver psychosocial first aid in selected locations. Yet such activity can coexist with declining staffing continuity, disrupted data and referral systems, weakened public duty-bearing, and fractured local legitimacy. Service continuity can therefore persist in fragments while protective continuity continues to collapse. This is the empirical condition the article seeks to theorize. Sudan also demonstrates that system fragmentation is relational. Protection risks are shaped not only by the intensity of violence but by the quality of connection between educational actors, protection actors, communities, and public authorities. In places where any one of these links weakens, the others carry additional strain. Where several weaken simultaneously, children can become administratively invisible even if they remain physically present within a humanitarian response area. This is precisely why a systems-oriented concept is required: not because systems language is fashionable, but because the problem itself is relational rather than purely sectoral. 3. Literature review 3.1 Education in emergencies: access, continuity, and the limits of output-centred framing Research on education in emergencies has expanded well beyond a narrow concern with access. Burde et al. (2017) show that EiE scholarship increasingly addresses continuity of learning, well-being, teacher support, and conflict-sensitive educational practice. At the policy level, recent human rights framing similarly emphasizes that education in armed conflict is both a right and a protective institution: attacks on schools, or their military use, undermine social continuity and expose children to wider harms (OHCHR 2025). Yet operational humanitarian practice often continues to privilege outputs that are easier to count than system continuity. Temporary learning spaces, school kits, or teacher incentives are essential, but they can be reported as achievements even where administrative continuity, school-level safety, referral systems, and trusted educational relationships are eroding. UNESCO’s work on institutional education information systems in emergencies underscores how weak data, fragmented coordination, and inadequate institutional environments undermine education planning and response in crisis settings (UNESCO 2022). EiE practice has thus moved conceptually beyond access, while implementation and measurement often remain output-centred. The protection role of schooling has also been emphasized by legal and policy actors beyond the EiE field. Recent UN expert commentary notes that functioning schools can reduce exposure to recruitment, child labour, sexual violence, forced marriage, and exploitation while also offering psychosocial healing and continuity of community life (OHCHR 2025). These arguments are significant because they shift attention from education as a sectoral entitlement to education as a protective institution. However, the leap from institution to system is not always made explicit. A school may operate as a protective institution only when linked to surrounding systems of care, follow-up, and accountability. 3.2 Child protection and psychosocial support: layered harm and embedded support The child protection and psychosocial support literature offers a complementary but still incomplete perspective. Kamali et al. (2020) document the breadth of mental health and psychosocial support interventions delivered to women and children in conflict settings, while noting that high-quality evidence on coverage and effectiveness remains limited. Arega (2023) shows that more recent conflict-related interventions for children have focused heavily on family-based approaches, with comparatively fewer studies on community-level systems. Yu et al. (2023) map a substantial body of school-based MHPSS work in low- and middle-income countries but also note significant gaps across outcomes and age groups. These studies converge on an important point: child protection and psychosocial well-being are not secured by isolated interventions alone. They depend on embedded support structures—schools, families, caregivers, community actors, and functioning referral systems. JIHA’s own publications reinforce this point. Nur et al. (2025) demonstrate the feasibility and promise of school-based screening and para-social worker-led referral in a refugee settlement, while Schaller (2025) argues that protecting children in conflict requires stronger systems for rights protection, monitoring, and actionable policy response. What remains less theorized is how these structures hold—or fail—when education and protection are themselves embedded in institutions undergoing wartime fragmentation. The psychosocial literature additionally emphasizes the risks of mistaking intervention delivery for sustained support. Reviews repeatedly note that evidence is stronger for the existence of programs than for their continuity, coverage, or systems integration (Kamali et al. 2020; Tol et al. 2023). This is highly relevant to Sudan because the problem is not only whether psychosocial or protection interventions are available, but whether they remain connected to the educational, social, and administrative environments through which children can actually access and benefit from them. 3.3 Humanitarian systems, localization, and the limits of substitution Humanitarian systems literature offers useful but incomplete resources for this question. Debates on the humanitarian-development-peace nexus have highlighted the limits of short-term, project-based response and the need to better connect humanitarian action to longer-term institutional trajectories (Brown et al. 2024). JIHA’s recent conversations on localization, capacity sharing, and organizational form are especially relevant. Khan and Kontinen (2022) show that localization is often impeded not simply by weak local capacity, but by structural conditions that constrain humanitarian space and decision-making. Tilli et al. (2026) similarly foreground capacity sharing as a relational rather than purely technical process, drawing attention to how expertise and authority move within humanitarian responses. Öberg (2026) shows how pooled fund governance brings certain actors into humanitarian financing architecture while shaping the terms of participation. Zulkaphil (2026) and Liontiris and Ruano (2026) further demonstrate that financing choices and underfunding shape humanitarian ethics and operational outcomes. Together, these studies help explain why humanitarian substitution can be administratively efficient yet systemically corrosive. This literature is highly relevant to Sudan because it suggests that protective-system fragmentation is not only a result of conflict intensity. It is also a function of how humanitarian systems distribute authority, reporting incentives, and partnership forms. Where local actors are treated primarily as implementing arms of externally designed projects, or where public institutions are bypassed as a matter of routine rather than strategy, the minimum functions that connect children to durable protection may be weakened even when service delivery continues. A brief note of caution is warranted here. Systems language can become technocratic if it treats governance structures as neutral objects rather than politically contested arrangements. The argument in this article is therefore not that more systems always mean better protection. It is that under conditions of acute erosion, some minimum functions must remain intact if children are to remain visible, connected, and protectable at all. 3.4 Systems strengthening, resilience, and the missing bridge Systems strengthening and resilience are widely invoked in fragile settings, but they are often conflated. Recent work in health systems research is instructive. Truppa et al. (2024) show that resilience frameworks in conflict settings frequently focus on absorption and adaptation but less often on transformation, while communities remain under-represented in systems analysis. In a subsequent analysis, Truppa et al. (2026) argue that strengthening and resilience should be distinguished across actors, levels, and time, precisely because they imply different kinds of intervention and different degrees of temporal possibility. This distinction matters for Sudan. System strengthening generally implies improving system performance over time. Resilience concerns the capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform under stress. Both are relevant, but neither fully captures moments in which the immediate problem is preventing a system from collapsing below a threshold at which it can no longer perform its most basic protective functions. The preservation of safe access, referral continuity, staff continuity, administrative memory, and public responsibility for children may be prior to, and analytically distinct from, both strengthening and resilience. The gap, then, is not simply that education and child protection are discussed separately. It is that the literature insufficiently theorizes what happens when service continuity is partially restored while the connective structures that make those services protective continue to erode. The article responds to this gap by proposing systems protection not as a grand new theory of humanitarianism, but as a bounded analytic lens tailored to contexts of acute erosion. Its value lies in helping analysts and practitioners identify when the essential conditions of protection are still holding, when they are degrading, and when they have collapsed below a minimally viable threshold. 4. Conceptual framework: systems protection as the preservation of minimum protective function Systems protection is introduced here not as a replacement for systems strengthening or resilience, but as a bounded analytic lens for a different temporal and operational problem. Systems strengthening seeks to improve system performance over time. Resilience refers to a system’s capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform under stress. Systems protection, by contrast, concerns the preservation of minimum protective function during active violence or acute institutional erosion—before strengthening or transformation are realistically possible (Truppa et al. 2024; Truppa et al. 2026). Minimum protective function refers to the threshold below which education–child protection systems can no longer perform their most basic safeguarding roles for children. In this article, five dimensions are central: continuity of safe access; continuity of referral pathways; continuity of staffing, records, and coordination; protection of physical and social infrastructure; and continuity of public duty-bearing. The concept becomes analytically useful only if these dimensions can be diagnosed in practice. Table 1 therefore translates the framework into a diagnostic matrix that identifies observable signals and rough thresholds for judging whether minimum protective function is intact, degraded, or collapsed. Table 1 Minimum Protective Function Diagnostic Matrix. Thresholds are illustrative heuristics; context-specific calibration is required. Dimension Intact Degraded Collapsed Illustrative data source Safe access Regular child access to learning/protection spaces with low incident interruption Frequent interruption; >20% of planned sessions cancelled, or access restricted for key groups Access largely absent or unsafe; school/protection sites non-functional or militarized Site reporting, access logs, incident reports Referral continuity Referral pathways exist with documented feedback loops and follow-up Referrals occur but feedback loops inconsistent; significant case loss or delayed follow-up Referral pathways nominal only or absent; no functioning follow-up across sectors Case management records, referral audits, partner review Staffing, records, coordination Core staff and records retained; regular coordination with documented decisions > 30% turnover in 6 months; records partial; coordination irregular or ad hoc High turnover or displacement; records lost; coordination reduced to episodic information exchange HR tracking, meeting minutes, admin records Physical/social infrastructure Schools, communication, trusted adults, and community anchors function sufficiently Partial infrastructure loss; key social anchors displaced; communication outages recurrent Facilities inaccessible or destroyed; trusted adults dispersed; no stable social anchor Facility assessments, connectivity logs, partner mapping Public duty-bearing Public institutions retain visible roles in planning, referral, or oversight Public role uneven, symbolic, or territorially fragmented; humanitarian substitution rising Public responsibility effectively replaced by parallel humanitarian delivery MoUs, coordination architecture, partner role mapping 4.1 Why these five dimensions? Scope, boundaries, and exclusions The five dimensions are not presented as a complete theory of protection. They were selected because they capture the minimum cross-sector functions without which education and child protection cannot reliably operate as protective systems in acute crisis. Safe access and referral continuity cover the immediate child-facing pathway into support. Staffing, records, and coordination continuity capture the administrative mechanisms that allow systems to remember, follow up, and act over time. Physical and social infrastructure captures the spaces, communication channels, and relational anchors through which children remain visible. Public duty-bearing captures whether responsibility for children remains institutionally assigned rather than wholly externalized to short-term humanitarian delivery. The framework does not claim that these are the only important dimensions of protection. Community legitimacy, child participation, and accountability to affected populations are all indispensable to ethically robust humanitarian action. They are treated here as cross-cutting normative conditions rather than standalone dimensions because the article is concerned with the minimum functions required to keep protective continuity from collapsing under acute erosion. In other words, the framework is intentionally minimalist. It asks what must remain in place for protection to remain possible at all, not what an ideal or fully accountable system would contain. This boundedness is also designed to avoid conceptual inflation. If every desirable feature of humanitarian governance were folded into the framework, systems protection would become another expansive governance concept and lose its usefulness in acute conflict settings. The five dimensions are therefore offered as minimum stabilizers of protective continuity rather than as a complete map of justice, legitimacy, or participation. 4.2 Reading the dimensions relationally Each of the five dimensions is relational. Safe access is meaningful only if children can reach and remain within learning or protection spaces without disproportionate exposure to violence, exclusion, or exploitation. Referral continuity matters because education and child protection are interconnected through identification, follow-up, escalation, and feedback loops. Staffing, records, and coordination matter because protective action depends on memory, trust, continuity, and decisions that survive beyond the life of a single activity. Physical and social infrastructure matter because schools, communication systems, trusted adults, and community anchors make children visible within a protective environment. Public duty-bearing matters because total humanitarian substitution can hollow out the institutional responsibility through which children’s protection is publicly recognized and sustained. The matrix is not intended as a universal scorecard. Thresholds will vary by context, security environment, and baseline system capacity. Its purpose is narrower: to prevent the concept from remaining rhetorical by making every major claim traceable to observable features of system continuity or decay. Table 1 . Minimum Protective Function Diagnostic Matrix. Thresholds are illustrative heuristics; context-specific calibration is required. [Place Table 1 . Minimum Protective Function Diagnostic Matrix.] 5. Methodology, documentary bias, and positionality This article employs a critical practitioner policy analysis with documentary triangulation. The phrase refers to a form of documentary and interpretive analysis in which policy texts are read both as evidence about humanitarian conditions and as artifacts of institutional priorities, visibility, and power. The approach overlaps with critical policy analysis in its attention to how problems are framed and governed, and with reflexive practitioner scholarship in its willingness to treat insider knowledge as situated rather than self-validating. It differs from critical discourse analysis because the goal is not primarily to analyze language as discourse in its own right; from policy ethnography because it is not based on immersive field observation; and from process tracing because it does not claim to reconstruct causal sequence through primary evidence. Its purpose is more bounded: to identify and interpret the governance conditions under which minimum protective function appears to hold, degrade, or collapse. The documentary corpus comprises four principal evidence streams. First, the article draws on OCHA’s Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026 and its summary materials, which provide a current synthesis of needs, severity, child protection risks, displacement, and sectoral response planning (OCHA 2026a; OCHA 2026b). Second, it uses UNHCR’s 2026 displacement reporting to ground analysis of repeated movement, return, and onward displacement (UNHCR 2026). Third, it uses IPC analysis of acute food insecurity to situate vulnerability within broader conditions of deprivation and famine risk (IPC 2025). Fourth, it engages peer-reviewed and policy literature on education in emergencies, psychosocial support, humanitarian systems, localization, systems strengthening, and resilience. The analytical procedure combines thematic coding and critical policy analysis. Documents were read for how they frame: (1) access and continuity; (2) protection risks and referral; (3) staffing, coordination, and administrative continuity; (4) the role of public institutions; and (5) the role of local actors in sustaining system function. These themes were then interpreted through the five dimensions of minimum protective function set out in Section 4 . The goal was not simply to summarize documents, but to identify recurrent patterns through which partial restoration of services coexists with erosion in the structures that make those services protective. A key methodological challenge lies in the character of the documentary evidence itself. OCHA, UNHCR, and IPC products are indispensable, but they are not neutral mirrors of reality. They are planning and advocacy documents shaped by access constraints, funding politics, and the imperative to foreground life-saving needs. These incentives can produce several distortions. First, they often privilege measurable urgency—caseloads, severity, and immediate life-saving metrics—over slower forms of systemic decay. Second, they may underrepresent territorial blind spots where access is poor or insecurity prevents consistent assessment. Third, they can naturalize humanitarian substitution by documenting service gaps without always capturing the long-term effects of bypassing weakened public institutions. Where documents diverged in figures, emphasis, or severity claims, the analysis did not treat those divergences as errors to be smoothed away. Instead, contradictions were read analytically as indicators of institutional positioning, variable visibility, and access limitations. For example, differences in emphasis between population-movement reporting and planning narratives were treated not as simple inconsistencies but as evidence of the distinct purpose’s documents serve: registration, planning, advocacy, or prioritization. In that sense, contradiction across documents was part of the evidentiary terrain rather than a problem external to it. To mitigate documentary bias, the article treats documents as both evidence and artifacts. Claims are cross-read across sources rather than taken from a single document in isolation. Planning figures are interpreted alongside conceptual literature on systems and with attention to what the documents do not readily see: staff continuity, administrative memory, loss of feedback loops, and the erosion of duty-bearing. The diagnostic matrix in Table 1 is partly a corrective to documentary bias: it translates broad planning language into observable signals that can be examined more critically across settings and over time. The article is also shaped by practitioner positionality. Writing from within humanitarian education and child protection practice offers access to the textures of programming, coordination, and institutional erosion that are often flattened in high-level policy language. It may also provide access to types of documents and interpretive contexts not always visible to outside observers. At the same time, proximity to the humanitarian system creates risks of normalization, over-familiarity, and loyalty bias. Practitioner knowledge is therefore treated here not as authoritative truth but as situated evidence to be disciplined through triangulation, bounded claims, and reflexive interpretation. The article deliberately avoids claims that exceed the documentary base. Ethically, the article is explicitly limited. It does not rely on direct interviews with vulnerable children, displaced families, or frontline workers in active conflict settings. This choice is both ethical and epistemic. Ethically, because extractive data collection in active war would be difficult to justify in a paper whose main contribution is structural and policy analytic. Epistemic, because the article does not claim to present a phenomenological account of children lived experience. Where it refers to child-specific harms, those claims are drawn from published humanitarian assessments and relevant literature rather than direct testimony collected for this manuscript. Further child-centred research remains necessary, but this article’s contribution lies elsewhere: in analyzing the institutional conditions under which child safety and learning remain possible or become unattainable. This design does not eliminate all limitations. Documentary analysis cannot fully capture the diversity of local adaptations underway, and the matrix proposed here is an interpretive tool rather than a validated instrument. Nor can it fully observe implementation-level dynamics such as why a specific referral collapsed or how a local coordination node survived. The article therefore avoids definitive causal claims where the evidence is inferential. It seeks a disciplined conceptual and policy analysis of a recurrent systemic problem that current humanitarian reporting allows us to identify with sufficient clarity. 6. Findings: from fragmentation as condition to fragmentation as mechanism 6.1 Fragmented service continuity is produced by funding, reporting, and security architectures The first finding is that partial service continuity in Sudan is not simply an unfortunate by-product of war. It is also produced by the interaction of donor reporting cycles, prioritization logics, and security constraints. OCHA’s 2026 response plan explicitly describes a highly constrained environment in which partners were forced to prioritize a basic survival package amid major funding cuts (OCHA 2026a). Under such conditions, humanitarian actors are rationally pushed toward what can be counted, defended, and delivered quickly. Output counting—numbers reached, kits distributed, sessions delivered—becomes the dominant reporting language because it travels efficiently across donor, cluster, and inter-agency systems. Continuity of referral, staff retention, administrative memory, and public duty-bearing are harder to quantify and therefore easier to displace from the centre of reporting. This has operational consequences. Short funding windows encourage programme architectures that can demonstrate immediate reach but may not sustain staffing continuity, records management, or feedback loops. Security protocols and access restrictions further reinforce siloing, as actors prioritize delivery within what is physically or politically reachable rather than maintaining inter-sector pathways across a fragmented landscape. The result is a pattern in which services persist in fragments while the connective tissue between them weakens. In this sense, protective-system fragmentation is not only a condition to which humanitarians respond. It is also plausibly shaped by the reporting and delivery architectures through which they operate. The problem is visible across several dimensions of minimum protective function. Safe access may be temporarily restored in one area while referral continuity to child protection or psychosocial support remains uncertain because communication systems are disrupted or partners cannot safely travel. Staffing continuity becomes fragile when frontline personnel are displaced or supported through intermittent funding rather than stable institutional arrangements. Public duty-bearing may recede further as humanitarian actors, under pressure to deliver quickly, default to parallel systems that bypass weakened institutional interfaces. The cumulative pattern is consistent with a decoupling of service presence from protective continuity. 6.2 Educational continuity does not guarantee protective continuity The second finding is that educational continuity, where it exists, cannot be assumed to produce protective continuity. Humanitarian discourse frequently treats schooling as self-evidently protective. Schools can indeed provide routine, oversight, psychosocial stabilization, and referral. However, in Sudan’s wartime conditions, the protective value of education depends on whether educational provision remains connected to functioning social and institutional supports. OCHA’s analysis of child protection risks points to repeated displacement, family separation, exclusion from services, and psychosocial harm, while UNHCR highlights the exhaustion of repeated flight and the long duration of children’s displacement (OCHA 2026b; UNHCR 2026). In such conditions, the loss of educational continuity does not merely mean missed learning. It means the loss of one of the few institutional sites in which children may encounter trusted adults, recognizable routines, and pathways into help. Yet where some learning activity continues without stable referral systems, child protection follow-up, or sustained adult oversight, the protective functions of education are weakened. Educational continuity becomes protective only when connected to referral, staffing, trust, and public responsibility. This is where the distinction between service continuity and minimum protective function becomes analytically decisive. A temporary learning space, a short-term educational programme, or an episodic psychosocial activity may all be valuable, but they do not automatically amount to protective continuity. The literature on MHPSS interventions suggests that sustained and embedded support structures matter more than episodic intervention alone (Kamali et al. 2020; Arega 2023; Yu et al. 2023). Sudan’s case is consistent with the same principle at system level: educational continuity appears to be protective only when connected to referral, staffing, trust, and public responsibility. Without those linkages, schooling may persist as a fragment but cannot reliably operate as protective architecture. 6.3 Administrative memory and public duty-bearing erode through substitution The third finding concerns the mechanisms through which damaged public institutions become further hollowed out. In highly fragile settings, humanitarian actors often confront a false binary: either work through public institutions and risk entanglement with weak or politically constrained structures, or bypass them and rely on parallel humanitarian delivery. Sudan suggests why this binary is analytically and operationally insufficient. Public institutions in war are often fractured and territorially uneven, yet they may still retain elements of duty-bearing, records, convening power, or legitimacy that matter for minimum protective function. What appears to accelerate erosion is not simply institutional weakness in itself, but substitution without administrative continuity. When humanitarian delivery is organized through short-term project modalities with separate reporting chains, partner rosters, and data systems, weakened institutional interfaces can lose even the fragments of administrative memory that remain. Coordination architectures may continue formally, but without stable records, common feedback loops, or continuity of participation they risk becoming informational rather than administrative mechanisms. In practice, this means that child protection and educational decisions may be repeatedly reassembled from scratch, with each new project cycle carrying its own operational logic. The systems literature helps explain why this matters. Truppa et al. (2024; 2026) emphasize that fragile-setting systems analysis must distinguish actors, levels, and time. Sudan suggests that public institutions may not be able to guarantee resilience or broad performance improvement, but even limited forms of administrative continuity—records, formal responsibility, local coordination nodes—can be essential to prevent complete externalization of responsibility for children. Systems protection therefore does not romanticize the state. It insists that bypassing damaged institutions carries systemic costs that should be named, monitored, and weighed rather than treated as neutral efficiency. A necessary counterargument must also be acknowledged. In some contexts, substitution may be ethically necessary because public institutions are perpetrators of harm, are actively obstructing aid, or are so compromised that direct engagement would endanger affected populations. The argument here is not that substitution is always wrong, but that substitution should be treated as a high-stakes protective decision with systemic consequences rather than as a neutral operational default. Even where substitution is necessary, the question remains how to avoid deepening long-term erosion in minimum protective function. A related mechanism is the erosion of feedback. Where referral or coordination systems lack documented follow-up, each organization can continue reporting activity while no actor remains accountable for whether a child actually reached the next protective node. Such breakdowns are easily hidden within high-level humanitarian reporting because they rarely appear as dramatic service gaps. Yet they are among the clearest signals that minimum protective function is degrading. 6.4 Local actors function as system-holders, not merely implementers The fourth finding is that local actors often sustain minimum protective function where formal systems are eroding. This includes teachers, caregivers, para-social workers, community-based actors, and ministry counterparts who preserve records, follow up informally, continue instruction under constrained conditions, or maintain trust networks through which children remain visible. OCHA’s 2026 response planning notes consultations with approximately 3,500 people and 145 community-based organizations across all 18 states, signaling that local actors are not marginal to the response architecture (OCHA 2026a). JIHA’s own contributions on localization and capacity sharing suggest why this matters: local actors are not simply delivery conduits but holders of legitimacy, continuity, and contextual knowledge (Khan and Kontinen 2022; Tilli et al. 2026). An anonymized illustrative pattern from Sudanese practice can clarify the point without disclosing sensitive operational detail. In several displacement settings, teachers or para-social workers have acted as the only reliable continuity mechanism when formal referral channels were disrupted. Even where official case-management systems stalled, these actors continued to identify at-risk children, notify relevant focal points informally, and maintain social visibility for children who might otherwise have disappeared from institutional attention. Such examples do not prove a uniform national pattern, but they are consistent with the broader argument that local actors often hold the relational continuity on which systems depend. The analytic significance of these actors is that they often carry forward minimum protective function where formal chains have fractured. Teachers sustain routine and visibility. Caregivers maintain protective practices and navigation of services. Community actors preserve social legitimacy and follow-up. Local officials maintain fragments of administrative memory. These roles are undervalued when humanitarian programming treats local actors primarily as implementing partners or beneficiaries rather than as carriers of system continuity. At the same time, recognizing local actors as system-holders should not be confused with celebrating their absorption of institutional failure. In many cases, these actors sustain continuity precisely because responsibility and risk have been transferred onto them without commensurate power or resources. Localized continuity can therefore coexist with extractive partnership structures, unpaid labor, or unfunded mandates. Systems protection should not romanticize resilience; it should name the conditions under which local actors are burdened with holding together what broader systems no longer sustain. Sudan’s distinctive lesson is therefore not merely that access is insufficient. It is that humanitarian action can inadvertently normalize a dangerous decoupling: partial service continuity coexisting with deeper protective-system erosion. If local actors are treated only as low-cost delivery channels, the relational and institutional functions they sustain remain invisible. If they are recognized as system-holders, however, then protecting the system includes protecting the conditions under which these actors can continue to carry memory, trust, and continuity. 7. Discussion and policy translation The argument developed here contributes to humanitarian debate in three ways. First, it reframes the problem of education and child protection in war from one of sectoral coordination alone to one of minimum protective function. Sudan demonstrates that the relevant question is not only whether services continue, but whether the functions that make those services protective remain intact. This is narrower and more operational than the familiar claim that access alone is insufficient. Second, the article clarifies the relationship between systems protection, systems strengthening, and resilience. Where violence is active, institutions are fragmented, and funding is sharply constrained, strengthening and transformation may be limited horizons. In such contexts, preserving minimum protective function may be the more realistic and ethically urgent objective. This does not make strengthening or resilience irrelevant; it relocates them in time and purpose. Third, the argument carries practical implications for humanitarian programming and monitoring. If systems protection is taken seriously, agencies should not create an entirely new bureaucracy. Instead, they should extend existing cluster and inter-agency reporting so that a small set of indicators captures whether minimum protective function is intact, degraded, or collapsed. Table 2 proposes a pragmatic monitoring framework aligned to the five dimensions set out above. Table 2 Practical monitoring framework for minimum protective function [Place Table 2 . Practical monitoring framework for minimum protective function] Dimension Practical monitoring indicator Possible existing data source Suggested frequency Safe access Percentage of planned education/protection activities cancelled for access or safety reasons Cluster 4Ws, site reports, access logs Monthly Referral continuity Proportion of referrals receiving documented feedback within agreed timeframe Case management/referral tracking Monthly or quarterly Staffing/records/coordination Staff turnover in key frontline posts and proportion of coordination actions with documented follow-up HR tracking, meeting minutes Quarterly Physical/social infrastructure Number of functioning sites with stable communication and identified trusted focal points Facility mapping, partner site reports Monthly Public duty-bearing Extent of public institutional participation in planning, referral, or oversight functions Meeting attendance, MoUs, role mapping Quarterly These indicators are intentionally simple. None requires wholly new data architecture. All could be embedded in existing cluster reporting, partner dashboards, or periodic coordination reviews. Their value lies less in precision than in shifting attention. They allow agencies to ask not only how many people were reached, but whether the functions that make those services protective are being preserved or lost. In principle, some of these indicators could replace weaker proxy metrics rather than merely supplement them, thereby limiting additional reporting burden. Monitoring frameworks, however, are not politically neutral. Used ethically, they can make systemic decay visible before collapse occurs; used poorly, they can become tools of performative accountability that simulate oversight while protecting institutions from substantive change. Systems protection therefore requires not only indicators but ethical application and interpretation. One concrete safeguard is that indicator review should involve local partners and relevant public actors wherever feasible, so that thresholds are interpreted against context and not turned into perverse incentives for superficial compliance. This also has implications for localization and humanitarian substitution. Recent JIHA scholarship points to the relational character of capacity sharing and the structural impediments to genuine localization (Khan and Kontinen 2022; Tilli et al. 2026). Systems protection complements those debates by offering a criterion for judging whether humanitarian partnership forms are preserving or eroding continuity. If a response increases output while reducing public duty-bearing, administrative memory, or trusted local interfaces, then it may be effective in the short term yet corrosive in systemic terms. There are, however, important limits to the framework. Systems are not neutral goods. Institutions can reproduce exclusion, inequity, and abuse; local structures can also be hierarchical or discriminatory. Systems protection is therefore not a normative defence of every existing system. Its value lies in diagnosing which minimum functions are necessary to keep children visible, connected, and protected, while remaining attentive to the harms some institutional arrangements may themselves produce. Sudan ultimately underlines a broader challenge for humanitarianism: the tension between what is measurable and what is protective. Coverage, caseloads, attendance, and activity counts are indispensable under emergency conditions. Yet if they become the dominant language of success, the loss of minimum protective function can remain invisible until its consequences are severe. Systems protection seeks to correct that imbalance by restoring attention to the connective architecture through which children’s learning and safety remain possible in war. Table 2 . Practical monitoring framework for minimum protective function [Place Table 2 . Practical monitoring framework for minimum protective function] 8. Conclusion Sudan’s war reveals a critical divergence: humanitarian services may continue in fragments while the minimum functions that make those services protective continue to erode. This article argued that the divergence cannot be adequately addressed through access-centred response alone. What is at stake is not merely the restoration of activity, but the preservation of minimum protective function between education, child protection, referral, coordination, social infrastructure, and public duty-bearing. The conceptual contribution of the article is to define systems protection as analytically distinct from systems strengthening and resilience. Where strengthening seeks improvement and resilience concerns adaptive capacity, systems protection focuses on threshold preservation under active institutional erosion. The empirical contribution is to show how Sudan’s war produces partial service continuity alongside deeper protective-system erosion and how this condition is reproduced through funding, reporting, security, and substitution dynamics. The policy contribution is to provide a practical monitoring framework through which agencies can assess whether the functions that make services protective remain intact. The article also argued for epistemic modesty. It does not substitute structural analysis for children’s voices, nor does it treat institutions or local structures as inherently benign. Rather, it offers a bounded lens for understanding what must remain intact—or be deliberately reconnected—if humanitarian action is to do more than deliver fragments. For donors as well as operational agencies, the implication is concrete: preserving minimum protective function is not only ethically preferable, but often materially less costly than rebuilding collapsed systems after avoidable erosion has already set in. Future research should test and refine the systems-protection framework through participatory and action-oriented work with Sudanese education and protection actors across contrasting conflict settings. Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate: Not applicable. This article is based on publicly available humanitarian and policy documentation. Consent for publication: Not applicable. The author declares that there are no competing interests. Funding: No outside funding was used to support this work. Competing interests: The author declares no competing interests. Author Contribution: M.H. M. Musa conceived the article, conducted the analysis, drafted the manuscript, and approved the final version. References Arega, N. T. (2023). Mental health and psychosocial support interventions for children affected by armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review. Child & Youth Care Forum , 52(6), 1431–1456. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-023-09741-0 Brown, S., Mena, R., & Brown, S. (2024). The peace dilemma in the triple nexus: Challenges and opportunities for the humanitarian–development–peace approach. Development in Practice , 34(5), 568–584. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2024.2334774 Burde, D., Kapit, A., Wahl, R. L., Guven, O., & Skarpeteig, M. I. (2017). Education in emergencies: A review of theory and research. Review of Educational Research , 87(3), 619–658. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654316671594 IPC. (2025). Sudan: Acute food insecurity situation for September 2025 and projections for October 2025–January 2026 and February–May 2026. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Available at: https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/c/1159787/ Kamali, M., Munyuzangabo, M., Siddiqui, F. J., Gaffey, M. F., Meteke, S., Als, D., et al. (2020). Delivering mental health and psychosocial support interventions to women and children in conflict settings: A systematic review. BMJ Global Health , 5(3), e002014. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002014 Khan, A. K., & Kontinen, T. (2022). Impediments to localization agenda: Humanitarian space in the Rohingya response in Bangladesh. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 7, Article 14. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-022-00122-1 Liontiris, M., & Ruano, A. L. (2026). Intersecting crises: A scoping review on the impact of underfunding, violations of international humanitarian law, and climate crisis on humanitarian action. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 11, Article 8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-026-00192-5 Loane, G., & Fal-Dutra Santos, R. (2017). Strengthening resilience: The ICRC’s community-based approach to ensuring the protection of education. International Review of the Red Cross , 99(905), 797–820. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383118000553 Nur, A., Seruwagi, G., Odwe, G., Kisaakye, P., Muthuri, S., Habteyesus, D., et al. (2025). Screening for sexual violence against children in humanitarian settings: A feasibility study of a para-social worker-led intervention in Uganda. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 10, Article 19. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-025-00185-w OCHA. (2026a). Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026 – Summary (30 March 2026). United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Available at: https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/sudan/sudan-humanitarian-needs-and-response-plan-2026-summary-march-2026 OCHA. (2026b). Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026 (April 2026). United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Available at: https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/sudan/sudan-humanitarian-needs-and-response-plan-2026 OHCHR. (2025). Education during armed conflict offers a lifeline, protection, stability and hope, says UN expert. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/education-during-armed-conflict-offers-lifeline-protection-stability-and Öberg, J. K. (2026). Faith-based organisations in multilateral humanitarian aid: A closer look at Country-based Pooled Funds. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 11, Article 2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-025-00188-7 Schaller, N. (2025). A dual dilemma: Protecting children’s rights in the context of COVID-19 and conflict. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 10, Article 4. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-024-00164-7 Tilli, J., Kauhanen, J., Vaskilampi, T., & Karvinen, I. (2026). Needs for capacity sharing in humanitarian responses: Qualitative study on experiences of professional and voluntary workforce. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 11, Article 10. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-026-00193-4 Tol, W. A., Le, P. T. D., Harrison, S. L., Galappatti, A., Annan, J., Baingana, F. K., et al. (2023). Mental health and psychosocial support in humanitarian settings: Research priorities for 2021–30. The Lancet Global Health , 11(6), e969–e975. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00128-6 Truppa, C., Saulnier, D. D., Bertone, M. P., Yamonn, N., Hafez, S., Witter, S., & Marchal, B. (2026). Getting unstuck: Reframing health systems strengthening and resilience in fragile and conflict-affected settings. BMJ Global Health , 11(2), e020061. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2025-020061 Truppa, C., Yaacoub, S., Valente, M., Celentano, G., Ragazzoni, L., & Saulnier, D. (2024). Health systems resilience in fragile and conflict-affected settings: A systematic scoping review. Conflict and Health , 18, Article 2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-023-00560-7 UNESCO. (2022). Strengthening institutional education information systems in emergencies and protracted crises: What has been achieved so far? United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Available at: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/strengthening-institutional-education-information-systems-emergencies-and-protracted-crises-what-has UNHCR. (2026). Three years on, war-weary Sudanese remain on the move (10 April 2026). United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing-notes/three-years-war-weary-sudanese-remain-move Yu, R., Perera, C., Sharma, M., Ipince, A., Bakrania, S., Shokraneh, F., et al. (2023). Child and adolescent mental health and psychosocial support interventions: An evidence and gap map of low- and middle-income countries. Campbell Systematic Reviews , 19(3), e1349. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1349 Zulkaphil, L. (2026). An analytical framework for examining the ethical dimensions of innovative humanitarian finance. Journal of International Humanitarian Action , 11, Article 9. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-026-00195-2 Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. 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Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eHumanitarian response in protracted war often generates a deceptive appearance of continuity. Learning spaces may reopen, referral pathways may be announced, psychosocial activities may be delivered, and attendance may be reported, yet the institutional and social structures that make such interventions protective can continue to deteriorate beneath the surface. In such situations, the presence of services does not necessarily indicate the presence of protection. Outputs remain visible while the architecture that gives those outputs meaning, safety, and durability continues to erode.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSudan offers a stark case of this problem. Humanitarian planning for 2026 identifies 33.7\u0026nbsp;million people in need of assistance, the highest number globally, while displacement has affected roughly one in four Sudanese, with large-scale repeated movement both within and beyond the country (OCHA 2026a; OCHA 2026b; UNHCR 2026). The crisis is also marked by acute food insecurity, attacks on civilian infrastructure, severe protection violations, and major funding cuts that have forced a shift toward a basic survival package for those in greatest need (IPC 2025; OCHA 2026a). These conditions matter not only because they indicate scale. They matter because they reveal the environments in which children\u0026rsquo;s learning, safety, and developmental continuity are being reorganized through institutional erosion.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChildren are central to this crisis, but the point is not simply that children are vulnerable. Children\u0026rsquo;s exposure to harm is structured by the quality of the institutions, relationships, and routines through which they are made visible, supported, and protected. OCHA\u0026rsquo;s 2026 planning materials describe widespread child protection risks in Sudan, including family separation, exploitation, exclusion from services, and significant psychosocial distress; in the 2025 multisector needs assessment, more than half of households reported at least one child showing signs of psychosocial distress in the previous three months (OCHA 2026b). This does not reduce children to passive recipients of harm. It highlights that children\u0026rsquo;s agency is exercised within settings whose protective conditions are being actively dismantled.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eExisting humanitarian analysis does not fully capture this problem. Education in emergencies scholarship has moved beyond a narrow concern with school access to consider continuity, quality, teacher support, and well-being. Child protection and psychosocial support scholarship has increasingly emphasized layered harms, embedded support structures, and the centrality of schools, families, and communities for referral and psychosocial stability (Burde et al. 2017; Kamali et al. 2020; Arega 2023; Yu et al. 2023). Yet education and child protection are still frequently operationalized as parallel sectors, while the interdependence of their minimum protective functions under conditions of active institutional erosion remains under-theorized.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePart of the problem lies in the way humanitarian success is narrated. In high-pressure emergency environments, agencies and donors need rapid metrics that can travel across clusters, pooled funds, and headquarters dashboards. Numbers of children reached, schools supported, or psychosocial sessions conducted therefore become not only technical measures but also political signals of relevance, urgency, and effectiveness. These indicators matter, but they can obscure whether the deeper functions that enable protection\u0026mdash;feedback loops, trusted adult relationships, records continuity, institutional duty-bearing, and minimally stable coordination\u0026mdash;are holding or disappearing. Sudan brings this distortion into unusually sharp relief because service restoration and institutional fragmentation are unfolding simultaneously and unevenly across the country.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis article defines systems protection at the outset as the preservation of minimum protective function during active violence or acute institutional erosion, before strengthening or transformation are realistically possible. The article argues that Sudan\u0026rsquo;s war exposes not simply the insufficiency of access-centred humanitarian response, but the dangers of restoring fragmented services while allowing the minimum protective functions that connect education, referral, public duty-bearing, and local legitimacy to continue collapsing. Systems protection is therefore proposed as a bounded analytic lens for identifying and preserving minimum protective function in contexts where longer-term systems strengthening and resilience agendas are not yet operationally attainable.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe article makes three contributions. First, it offers conceptual clarification. Systems strengthening seeks to improve system performance over time, while resilience refers to a system\u0026rsquo;s capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform under stress. Systems protection, by contrast, concerns threshold preservation under active erosion (Truppa et al. 2024; Truppa et al. 2026). Second, it advances an empirical argument: Sudan reveals a distinct condition in which partial service continuity coexists with deeper protective-system fragmentation. Third, it advances a policy argument: agencies should monitor and preserve minimum protective function rather than treat service coverage alone as a sufficient proxy for protection.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMethodologically, the article uses a critical practitioner policy analysis with documentary triangulation. It does not claim to offer a phenomenology of children\u0026rsquo;s lived experience, nor to substitute structural analysis for children\u0026rsquo;s voices. Rather, it examines the governance conditions under which education and child protection systems retain or lose minimum protective function in war, drawing on public humanitarian documentation and reflexive professional knowledge treated as evidence to be scrutinized rather than authority to be assumed.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe article proceeds as follows. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e positions Sudan as a critical case of protective-system fragmentation. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e reviews the literature and identifies the gap to which this article responds. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec8\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e defines systems protection as the preservation of minimum protective function, justifies the five dimensions used in the framework, and adds a diagnostic matrix that operationalizes the concept. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec11\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e5\u003c/span\u003e outlines the methodological design, documentary biases, positionality, and ethical limits of the study. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec12\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e6\u003c/span\u003e presents the findings, with particular attention to operational mechanisms of fragmentation and counterarguments. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec17\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e7\u003c/span\u003e translates the argument into a practical monitoring framework that agencies could embed in existing coordination processes. Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec18\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e8\u003c/span\u003e concludes and identifies future research priorities.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"2. Sudan as a critical case of protective-system fragmentation","content":"\u003cp\u003eSudan should be understood not only as a humanitarian emergency of exceptional severity, but also as a case of protective-system fragmentation under conditions of territorial and institutional reordering. OCHA\u0026rsquo;s 2026 planning documents portray a context shaped by mass displacement, attacks on schools and health facilities, economic collapse, explosive remnants of war, disrupted communications, serious protection violations, and sharply reduced humanitarian assistance due to funding cuts (OCHA 2026a; OCHA 2026b). What is at stake in such a setting is not only whether services can be delivered, but whether the minimum functions that make those services protective can still be sustained.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDisplacement is central to this problem. UNHCR reports that since April 2023 around 14\u0026nbsp;million people have been forced to flee, including roughly 9\u0026nbsp;million internally displaced and 4.4\u0026nbsp;million displaced across borders (UNHCR 2026). Displacement is not merely demographic. It is institutional. Teachers, ministry staff, para-social workers, community protection volunteers, and caregivers are dispersed across geographies with uneven security and service conditions. Administrative memory is interrupted, referral links are broken, and the relational trust through which children are identified, monitored, and supported is weakened. Repeated displacement deepens these effects by preventing the reconstitution of stable local arrangements.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe political geography of the war reinforces these patterns. OCHA notes that while some frontlines subsided in parts of Khartoum and Aj Jazirah, hostilities intensified in much of Darfur and Kordofan, producing a landscape of uneven returns, continued siege, and severe protection risk (OCHA 2026b). This asymmetry matters for systems analysis because it prevents neat distinctions between collapse and recovery. In some places children return to areas where schools, records, staffing, and services have been devastated; in others, communities continue to absorb new arrivals while their own social infrastructure is stretched beyond capacity. Protective systems are therefore fragmented not only across sectors but across space, with children encountering radically different combinations of risk, visibility, and support depending on where movement and conflict dynamics place them.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe destruction and disruption of civilian infrastructure further intensify systemic erosion. OCHA documents shelling, drone attacks, and airstrikes affecting schools, health facilities, water systems, markets, and other civilian infrastructure, alongside electricity blackouts, communication outages, and landmine contamination (OCHA 2026b). These are not merely contextual obstacles to programming. They are direct drivers of protective-system fragmentation. A school is not only a building for instruction; it is a site of routine, visibility, psychosocial anchoring, and referral. Communication systems are not only logistical tools; they sustain follow-up, case management, coordination, and continuity of care. When such infrastructures are damaged or inaccessible, protective functions weaken even where some services continue.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChild protection harms in Sudan must therefore be read structurally. OCHA describes heightened risks of abuse, exploitation, neglect, family separation, psychosocial harm, and exclusion from essential services, alongside grave violations including sexual violence, abduction, and forced recruitment (OCHA 2026b). These harms do not emerge only from the presence of violence. They are amplified by the deterioration of the social and institutional environments through which children are ordinarily safeguarded. When families are dispersed, schools close or are repurposed, social workers are displaced, and formal authorities lose presence or legitimacy, children\u0026rsquo;s exposure to harm becomes more difficult to detect, prevent, and respond to.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSudan is analytically distinctive because it demonstrates the dangers of partial service continuity amid broader protective-system fragmentation. Humanitarian actors may be able to establish temporary learning spaces, distribute educational materials, support frontline staff, or deliver psychosocial first aid in selected locations. Yet such activity can coexist with declining staffing continuity, disrupted data and referral systems, weakened public duty-bearing, and fractured local legitimacy. Service continuity can therefore persist in fragments while protective continuity continues to collapse. This is the empirical condition the article seeks to theorize.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSudan also demonstrates that system fragmentation is relational. Protection risks are shaped not only by the intensity of violence but by the quality of connection between educational actors, protection actors, communities, and public authorities. In places where any one of these links weakens, the others carry additional strain. Where several weaken simultaneously, children can become administratively invisible even if they remain physically present within a humanitarian response area. This is precisely why a systems-oriented concept is required: not because systems language is fashionable, but because the problem itself is relational rather than purely sectoral.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"3. Literature review","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec4\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e3.1 Education in emergencies: access, continuity, and the limits of output-centred framing\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eResearch on education in emergencies has expanded well beyond a narrow concern with access. Burde et al. (2017) show that EiE scholarship increasingly addresses continuity of learning, well-being, teacher support, and conflict-sensitive educational practice. At the policy level, recent human rights framing similarly emphasizes that education in armed conflict is both a right and a protective institution: attacks on schools, or their military use, undermine social continuity and expose children to wider harms (OHCHR 2025).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eYet operational humanitarian practice often continues to privilege outputs that are easier to count than system continuity. Temporary learning spaces, school kits, or teacher incentives are essential, but they can be reported as achievements even where administrative continuity, school-level safety, referral systems, and trusted educational relationships are eroding. UNESCO\u0026rsquo;s work on institutional education information systems in emergencies underscores how weak data, fragmented coordination, and inadequate institutional environments undermine education planning and response in crisis settings (UNESCO 2022). EiE practice has thus moved conceptually beyond access, while implementation and measurement often remain output-centred.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe protection role of schooling has also been emphasized by legal and policy actors beyond the EiE field. Recent UN expert commentary notes that functioning schools can reduce exposure to recruitment, child labour, sexual violence, forced marriage, and exploitation while also offering psychosocial healing and continuity of community life (OHCHR 2025). These arguments are significant because they shift attention from education as a sectoral entitlement to education as a protective institution. However, the leap from institution to system is not always made explicit. A school may operate as a protective institution only when linked to surrounding systems of care, follow-up, and accountability.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec5\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e3.2 Child protection and psychosocial support: layered harm and embedded support\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe child protection and psychosocial support literature offers a complementary but still incomplete perspective. Kamali et al. (2020) document the breadth of mental health and psychosocial support interventions delivered to women and children in conflict settings, while noting that high-quality evidence on coverage and effectiveness remains limited. Arega (2023) shows that more recent conflict-related interventions for children have focused heavily on family-based approaches, with comparatively fewer studies on community-level systems. Yu et al. (2023) map a substantial body of school-based MHPSS work in low- and middle-income countries but also note significant gaps across outcomes and age groups.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThese studies converge on an important point: child protection and psychosocial well-being are not secured by isolated interventions alone. They depend on embedded support structures\u0026mdash;schools, families, caregivers, community actors, and functioning referral systems. JIHA\u0026rsquo;s own publications reinforce this point. Nur et al. (2025) demonstrate the feasibility and promise of school-based screening and para-social worker-led referral in a refugee settlement, while Schaller (2025) argues that protecting children in conflict requires stronger systems for rights protection, monitoring, and actionable policy response. What remains less theorized is how these structures hold\u0026mdash;or fail\u0026mdash;when education and protection are themselves embedded in institutions undergoing wartime fragmentation.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe psychosocial literature additionally emphasizes the risks of mistaking intervention delivery for sustained support. Reviews repeatedly note that evidence is stronger for the existence of programs than for their continuity, coverage, or systems integration (Kamali et al. 2020; Tol et al. 2023). This is highly relevant to Sudan because the problem is not only whether psychosocial or protection interventions are available, but whether they remain connected to the educational, social, and administrative environments through which children can actually access and benefit from them.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec6\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e3.3 Humanitarian systems, localization, and the limits of substitution\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eHumanitarian systems literature offers useful but incomplete resources for this question. Debates on the humanitarian-development-peace nexus have highlighted the limits of short-term, project-based response and the need to better connect humanitarian action to longer-term institutional trajectories (Brown et al. 2024). JIHA\u0026rsquo;s recent conversations on localization, capacity sharing, and organizational form are especially relevant. Khan and Kontinen (2022) show that localization is often impeded not simply by weak local capacity, but by structural conditions that constrain humanitarian space and decision-making. Tilli et al. (2026) similarly foreground capacity sharing as a relational rather than purely technical process, drawing attention to how expertise and authority move within humanitarian responses. \u0026Ouml;berg (2026) shows how pooled fund governance brings certain actors into humanitarian financing architecture while shaping the terms of participation. Zulkaphil (2026) and Liontiris and Ruano (2026) further demonstrate that financing choices and underfunding shape humanitarian ethics and operational outcomes. Together, these studies help explain why humanitarian substitution can be administratively efficient yet systemically corrosive.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis literature is highly relevant to Sudan because it suggests that protective-system fragmentation is not only a result of conflict intensity. It is also a function of how humanitarian systems distribute authority, reporting incentives, and partnership forms. Where local actors are treated primarily as implementing arms of externally designed projects, or where public institutions are bypassed as a matter of routine rather than strategy, the minimum functions that connect children to durable protection may be weakened even when service delivery continues.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA brief note of caution is warranted here. Systems language can become technocratic if it treats governance structures as neutral objects rather than politically contested arrangements. The argument in this article is therefore not that more systems always mean better protection. It is that under conditions of acute erosion, some minimum functions must remain intact if children are to remain visible, connected, and protectable at all.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec7\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e3.4 Systems strengthening, resilience, and the missing bridge\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eSystems strengthening and resilience are widely invoked in fragile settings, but they are often conflated. Recent work in health systems research is instructive. Truppa et al. (2024) show that resilience frameworks in conflict settings frequently focus on absorption and adaptation but less often on transformation, while communities remain under-represented in systems analysis. In a subsequent analysis, Truppa et al. (2026) argue that strengthening and resilience should be distinguished across actors, levels, and time, precisely because they imply different kinds of intervention and different degrees of temporal possibility.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis distinction matters for Sudan. System strengthening generally implies improving system performance over time. Resilience concerns the capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform under stress. Both are relevant, but neither fully captures moments in which the immediate problem is preventing a system from collapsing below a threshold at which it can no longer perform its most basic protective functions. The preservation of safe access, referral continuity, staff continuity, administrative memory, and public responsibility for children may be prior to, and analytically distinct from, both strengthening and resilience. The gap, then, is not simply that education and child protection are discussed separately. It is that the literature insufficiently theorizes what happens when service continuity is partially restored while the connective structures that make those services protective continue to erode.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe article responds to this gap by proposing systems protection not as a grand new theory of humanitarianism, but as a bounded analytic lens tailored to contexts of acute erosion. Its value lies in helping analysts and practitioners identify when the essential conditions of protection are still holding, when they are degrading, and when they have collapsed below a minimally viable threshold.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"4. Conceptual framework: systems protection as the preservation of minimum protective function","content":"\u003cp\u003eSystems protection is introduced here not as a replacement for systems strengthening or resilience, but as a bounded analytic lens for a different temporal and operational problem. Systems strengthening seeks to improve system performance over time. Resilience refers to a system\u0026rsquo;s capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform under stress. Systems protection, by contrast, concerns the preservation of minimum protective function during active violence or acute institutional erosion\u0026mdash;before strengthening or transformation are realistically possible (Truppa et al. 2024; Truppa et al. 2026).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMinimum protective function refers to the threshold below which education\u0026ndash;child protection systems can no longer perform their most basic safeguarding roles for children. In this article, five dimensions are central: continuity of safe access; continuity of referral pathways; continuity of staffing, records, and coordination; protection of physical and social infrastructure; and continuity of public duty-bearing. The concept becomes analytically useful only if these dimensions can be diagnosed in practice. Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e therefore translates the framework into a diagnostic matrix that identifies observable signals and rough thresholds for judging whether minimum protective function is intact, degraded, or collapsed.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab1\" border=\"1\"\u003e \u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 1\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMinimum Protective Function Diagnostic Matrix.\u003c/b\u003e Thresholds are illustrative heuristics; context-specific calibration is required.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/caption\u003e \u003ccolgroup cols=\"5\"\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c5\" colnum=\"5\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cthead\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eDimension\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eIntact\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eDegraded\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCollapsed\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eIllustrative data source\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/thead\u003e \u003ctbody\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSafe access\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eRegular child access to learning/protection spaces with low incident interruption\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eFrequent interruption; \u0026gt;20% of planned sessions cancelled, or access restricted for key groups\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eAccess largely absent or unsafe; school/protection sites non-functional or militarized\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSite reporting, access logs, incident reports\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eReferral continuity\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eReferral pathways exist with documented feedback loops and follow-up\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eReferrals occur but feedback loops inconsistent; significant case loss or delayed follow-up\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eReferral pathways nominal only or absent; no functioning follow-up across sectors\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCase management records, referral audits, partner review\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eStaffing, records, coordination\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCore staff and records retained; regular coordination with documented decisions\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;30% turnover in 6 months; records partial; coordination irregular or ad hoc\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eHigh turnover or displacement; records lost; coordination reduced to episodic information exchange\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eHR tracking, meeting minutes, admin records\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePhysical/social infrastructure\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSchools, communication, trusted adults, and community anchors function sufficiently\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePartial infrastructure loss; key social anchors displaced; communication outages recurrent\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eFacilities inaccessible or destroyed; trusted adults dispersed; no stable social anchor\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eFacility assessments, connectivity logs, partner mapping\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePublic duty-bearing\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePublic institutions retain visible roles in planning, referral, or oversight\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePublic role uneven, symbolic, or territorially fragmented; humanitarian substitution rising\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePublic responsibility effectively replaced by parallel humanitarian delivery\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMoUs, coordination architecture, partner role mapping\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/tbody\u003e \u003c/colgroup\u003e \u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec9\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e4.1 Why these five dimensions? Scope, boundaries, and exclusions\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe five dimensions are not presented as a complete theory of protection. They were selected because they capture the minimum cross-sector functions without which education and child protection cannot reliably operate as protective systems in acute crisis. Safe access and referral continuity cover the immediate child-facing pathway into support. Staffing, records, and coordination continuity capture the administrative mechanisms that allow systems to remember, follow up, and act over time. Physical and social infrastructure captures the spaces, communication channels, and relational anchors through which children remain visible. Public duty-bearing captures whether responsibility for children remains institutionally assigned rather than wholly externalized to short-term humanitarian delivery.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe framework does not claim that these are the only important dimensions of protection. Community legitimacy, child participation, and accountability to affected populations are all indispensable to ethically robust humanitarian action. They are treated here as cross-cutting normative conditions rather than standalone dimensions because the article is concerned with the minimum functions required to keep protective continuity from collapsing under acute erosion. In other words, the framework is intentionally minimalist. It asks what must remain in place for protection to remain possible at all, not what an ideal or fully accountable system would contain.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis boundedness is also designed to avoid conceptual inflation. If every desirable feature of humanitarian governance were folded into the framework, systems protection would become another expansive governance concept and lose its usefulness in acute conflict settings. The five dimensions are therefore offered as minimum stabilizers of protective continuity rather than as a complete map of justice, legitimacy, or participation.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec10\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e4.2 Reading the dimensions relationally\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eEach of the five dimensions is relational. Safe access is meaningful only if children can reach and remain within learning or protection spaces without disproportionate exposure to violence, exclusion, or exploitation. Referral continuity matters because education and child protection are interconnected through identification, follow-up, escalation, and feedback loops. Staffing, records, and coordination matter because protective action depends on memory, trust, continuity, and decisions that survive beyond the life of a single activity. Physical and social infrastructure matter because schools, communication systems, trusted adults, and community anchors make children visible within a protective environment. Public duty-bearing matters because total humanitarian substitution can hollow out the institutional responsibility through which children\u0026rsquo;s protection is publicly recognized and sustained.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe matrix is not intended as a universal scorecard. Thresholds will vary by context, security environment, and baseline system capacity. Its purpose is narrower: to prevent the concept from remaining rhetorical by making every major claim traceable to observable features of system continuity or decay.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e. \u003cb\u003eMinimum Protective Function Diagnostic Matrix.\u003c/b\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThresholds are illustrative heuristics; context-specific calibration is required.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003e[Place\u003c/b\u003e Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e. \u003cb\u003eMinimum Protective Function Diagnostic Matrix.]\u003c/b\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"5. Methodology, documentary bias, and positionality","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis article employs a critical practitioner policy analysis with documentary triangulation. The phrase refers to a form of documentary and interpretive analysis in which policy texts are read both as evidence about humanitarian conditions and as artifacts of institutional priorities, visibility, and power. The approach overlaps with critical policy analysis in its attention to how problems are framed and governed, and with reflexive practitioner scholarship in its willingness to treat insider knowledge as situated rather than self-validating. It differs from critical discourse analysis because the goal is not primarily to analyze language as discourse in its own right; from policy ethnography because it is not based on immersive field observation; and from process tracing because it does not claim to reconstruct causal sequence through primary evidence. Its purpose is more bounded: to identify and interpret the governance conditions under which minimum protective function appears to hold, degrade, or collapse.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe documentary corpus comprises four principal evidence streams. First, the article draws on OCHA\u0026rsquo;s Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026 and its summary materials, which provide a current synthesis of needs, severity, child protection risks, displacement, and sectoral response planning (OCHA 2026a; OCHA 2026b). Second, it uses UNHCR\u0026rsquo;s 2026 displacement reporting to ground analysis of repeated movement, return, and onward displacement (UNHCR 2026). Third, it uses IPC analysis of acute food insecurity to situate vulnerability within broader conditions of deprivation and famine risk (IPC 2025). Fourth, it engages peer-reviewed and policy literature on education in emergencies, psychosocial support, humanitarian systems, localization, systems strengthening, and resilience.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe analytical procedure combines thematic coding and critical policy analysis. Documents were read for how they frame: (1) access and continuity; (2) protection risks and referral; (3) staffing, coordination, and administrative continuity; (4) the role of public institutions; and (5) the role of local actors in sustaining system function. These themes were then interpreted through the five dimensions of minimum protective function set out in Section \u003cspan refid=\"Sec8\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e. The goal was not simply to summarize documents, but to identify recurrent patterns through which partial restoration of services coexists with erosion in the structures that make those services protective.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA key methodological challenge lies in the character of the documentary evidence itself. OCHA, UNHCR, and IPC products are indispensable, but they are not neutral mirrors of reality. They are planning and advocacy documents shaped by access constraints, funding politics, and the imperative to foreground life-saving needs. These incentives can produce several distortions. First, they often privilege measurable urgency\u0026mdash;caseloads, severity, and immediate life-saving metrics\u0026mdash;over slower forms of systemic decay. Second, they may underrepresent territorial blind spots where access is poor or insecurity prevents consistent assessment. Third, they can naturalize humanitarian substitution by documenting service gaps without always capturing the long-term effects of bypassing weakened public institutions.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhere documents diverged in figures, emphasis, or severity claims, the analysis did not treat those divergences as errors to be smoothed away. Instead, contradictions were read analytically as indicators of institutional positioning, variable visibility, and access limitations. For example, differences in emphasis between population-movement reporting and planning narratives were treated not as simple inconsistencies but as evidence of the distinct purpose\u0026rsquo;s documents serve: registration, planning, advocacy, or prioritization. In that sense, contradiction across documents was part of the evidentiary terrain rather than a problem external to it.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTo mitigate documentary bias, the article treats documents as both evidence and artifacts. Claims are cross-read across sources rather than taken from a single document in isolation. Planning figures are interpreted alongside conceptual literature on systems and with attention to what the documents do not readily see: staff continuity, administrative memory, loss of feedback loops, and the erosion of duty-bearing. The diagnostic matrix in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e is partly a corrective to documentary bias: it translates broad planning language into observable signals that can be examined more critically across settings and over time.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe article is also shaped by practitioner positionality. Writing from within humanitarian education and child protection practice offers access to the textures of programming, coordination, and institutional erosion that are often flattened in high-level policy language. It may also provide access to types of documents and interpretive contexts not always visible to outside observers. At the same time, proximity to the humanitarian system creates risks of normalization, over-familiarity, and loyalty bias. Practitioner knowledge is therefore treated here not as authoritative truth but as situated evidence to be disciplined through triangulation, bounded claims, and reflexive interpretation. The article deliberately avoids claims that exceed the documentary base.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eEthically, the article is explicitly limited. It does not rely on direct interviews with vulnerable children, displaced families, or frontline workers in active conflict settings. This choice is both ethical and epistemic. Ethically, because extractive data collection in active war would be difficult to justify in a paper whose main contribution is structural and policy analytic. Epistemic, because the article does not claim to present a phenomenological account of children lived experience. Where it refers to child-specific harms, those claims are drawn from published humanitarian assessments and relevant literature rather than direct testimony collected for this manuscript. Further child-centred research remains necessary, but this article\u0026rsquo;s contribution lies elsewhere: in analyzing the institutional conditions under which child safety and learning remain possible or become unattainable.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis design does not eliminate all limitations. Documentary analysis cannot fully capture the diversity of local adaptations underway, and the matrix proposed here is an interpretive tool rather than a validated instrument. Nor can it fully observe implementation-level dynamics such as why a specific referral collapsed or how a local coordination node survived. The article therefore avoids definitive causal claims where the evidence is inferential. It seeks a disciplined conceptual and policy analysis of a recurrent systemic problem that current humanitarian reporting allows us to identify with sufficient clarity.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"6. Findings: from fragmentation as condition to fragmentation as mechanism","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec13\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e6.1 Fragmented service continuity is produced by funding, reporting, and security architectures\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe first finding is that partial service continuity in Sudan is not simply an unfortunate by-product of war. It is also produced by the interaction of donor reporting cycles, prioritization logics, and security constraints. OCHA\u0026rsquo;s 2026 response plan explicitly describes a highly constrained environment in which partners were forced to prioritize a basic survival package amid major funding cuts (OCHA 2026a). Under such conditions, humanitarian actors are rationally pushed toward what can be counted, defended, and delivered quickly. Output counting\u0026mdash;numbers reached, kits distributed, sessions delivered\u0026mdash;becomes the dominant reporting language because it travels efficiently across donor, cluster, and inter-agency systems. Continuity of referral, staff retention, administrative memory, and public duty-bearing are harder to quantify and therefore easier to displace from the centre of reporting.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis has operational consequences. Short funding windows encourage programme architectures that can demonstrate immediate reach but may not sustain staffing continuity, records management, or feedback loops. Security protocols and access restrictions further reinforce siloing, as actors prioritize delivery within what is physically or politically reachable rather than maintaining inter-sector pathways across a fragmented landscape. The result is a pattern in which services persist in fragments while the connective tissue between them weakens. In this sense, protective-system fragmentation is not only a condition to which humanitarians respond. It is also plausibly shaped by the reporting and delivery architectures through which they operate.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe problem is visible across several dimensions of minimum protective function. Safe access may be temporarily restored in one area while referral continuity to child protection or psychosocial support remains uncertain because communication systems are disrupted or partners cannot safely travel. Staffing continuity becomes fragile when frontline personnel are displaced or supported through intermittent funding rather than stable institutional arrangements. Public duty-bearing may recede further as humanitarian actors, under pressure to deliver quickly, default to parallel systems that bypass weakened institutional interfaces. The cumulative pattern is consistent with a decoupling of service presence from protective continuity.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec14\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e6.2 Educational continuity does not guarantee protective continuity\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe second finding is that educational continuity, where it exists, cannot be assumed to produce protective continuity. Humanitarian discourse frequently treats schooling as self-evidently protective. Schools can indeed provide routine, oversight, psychosocial stabilization, and referral. However, in Sudan\u0026rsquo;s wartime conditions, the protective value of education depends on whether educational provision remains connected to functioning social and institutional supports.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOCHA\u0026rsquo;s analysis of child protection risks points to repeated displacement, family separation, exclusion from services, and psychosocial harm, while UNHCR highlights the exhaustion of repeated flight and the long duration of children\u0026rsquo;s displacement (OCHA 2026b; UNHCR 2026). In such conditions, the loss of educational continuity does not merely mean missed learning. It means the loss of one of the few institutional sites in which children may encounter trusted adults, recognizable routines, and pathways into help. Yet where some learning activity continues without stable referral systems, child protection follow-up, or sustained adult oversight, the protective functions of education are weakened. Educational continuity becomes protective only when connected to referral, staffing, trust, and public responsibility.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis is where the distinction between service continuity and minimum protective function becomes analytically decisive. A temporary learning space, a short-term educational programme, or an episodic psychosocial activity may all be valuable, but they do not automatically amount to protective continuity. The literature on MHPSS interventions suggests that sustained and embedded support structures matter more than episodic intervention alone (Kamali et al. 2020; Arega 2023; Yu et al. 2023). Sudan\u0026rsquo;s case is consistent with the same principle at system level: educational continuity appears to be protective only when connected to referral, staffing, trust, and public responsibility. Without those linkages, schooling may persist as a fragment but cannot reliably operate as protective architecture.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec15\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e6.3 Administrative memory and public duty-bearing erode through substitution\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe third finding concerns the mechanisms through which damaged public institutions become further hollowed out. In highly fragile settings, humanitarian actors often confront a false binary: either work through public institutions and risk entanglement with weak or politically constrained structures, or bypass them and rely on parallel humanitarian delivery. Sudan suggests why this binary is analytically and operationally insufficient. Public institutions in war are often fractured and territorially uneven, yet they may still retain elements of duty-bearing, records, convening power, or legitimacy that matter for minimum protective function.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhat appears to accelerate erosion is not simply institutional weakness in itself, but substitution without administrative continuity. When humanitarian delivery is organized through short-term project modalities with separate reporting chains, partner rosters, and data systems, weakened institutional interfaces can lose even the fragments of administrative memory that remain. Coordination architectures may continue formally, but without stable records, common feedback loops, or continuity of participation they risk becoming informational rather than administrative mechanisms. In practice, this means that child protection and educational decisions may be repeatedly reassembled from scratch, with each new project cycle carrying its own operational logic.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe systems literature helps explain why this matters. Truppa et al. (2024; 2026) emphasize that fragile-setting systems analysis must distinguish actors, levels, and time. Sudan suggests that public institutions may not be able to guarantee resilience or broad performance improvement, but even limited forms of administrative continuity\u0026mdash;records, formal responsibility, local coordination nodes\u0026mdash;can be essential to prevent complete externalization of responsibility for children. Systems protection therefore does not romanticize the state. It insists that bypassing damaged institutions carries systemic costs that should be named, monitored, and weighed rather than treated as neutral efficiency.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA necessary counterargument must also be acknowledged. In some contexts, substitution may be ethically necessary because public institutions are perpetrators of harm, are actively obstructing aid, or are so compromised that direct engagement would endanger affected populations. The argument here is not that substitution is always wrong, but that substitution should be treated as a high-stakes protective decision with systemic consequences rather than as a neutral operational default. Even where substitution is necessary, the question remains how to avoid deepening long-term erosion in minimum protective function.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA related mechanism is the erosion of feedback. Where referral or coordination systems lack documented follow-up, each organization can continue reporting activity while no actor remains accountable for whether a child actually reached the next protective node. Such breakdowns are easily hidden within high-level humanitarian reporting because they rarely appear as dramatic service gaps. Yet they are among the clearest signals that minimum protective function is degrading.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv id=\"Sec16\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e \u003ch2\u003e6.4 Local actors function as system-holders, not merely implementers\u003c/h2\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe fourth finding is that local actors often sustain minimum protective function where formal systems are eroding. This includes teachers, caregivers, para-social workers, community-based actors, and ministry counterparts who preserve records, follow up informally, continue instruction under constrained conditions, or maintain trust networks through which children remain visible. OCHA\u0026rsquo;s 2026 response planning notes consultations with approximately 3,500 people and 145 community-based organizations across all 18 states, signaling that local actors are not marginal to the response architecture (OCHA 2026a). JIHA\u0026rsquo;s own contributions on localization and capacity sharing suggest why this matters: local actors are not simply delivery conduits but holders of legitimacy, continuity, and contextual knowledge (Khan and Kontinen 2022; Tilli et al. 2026).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAn anonymized illustrative pattern from Sudanese practice can clarify the point without disclosing sensitive operational detail. In several displacement settings, teachers or para-social workers have acted as the only reliable continuity mechanism when formal referral channels were disrupted. Even where official case-management systems stalled, these actors continued to identify at-risk children, notify relevant focal points informally, and maintain social visibility for children who might otherwise have disappeared from institutional attention. Such examples do not prove a uniform national pattern, but they are consistent with the broader argument that local actors often hold the relational continuity on which systems depend.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe analytic significance of these actors is that they often carry forward minimum protective function where formal chains have fractured. Teachers sustain routine and visibility. Caregivers maintain protective practices and navigation of services. Community actors preserve social legitimacy and follow-up. Local officials maintain fragments of administrative memory. These roles are undervalued when humanitarian programming treats local actors primarily as implementing partners or beneficiaries rather than as carriers of system continuity.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAt the same time, recognizing local actors as system-holders should not be confused with celebrating their absorption of institutional failure. In many cases, these actors sustain continuity precisely because responsibility and risk have been transferred onto them without commensurate power or resources. Localized continuity can therefore coexist with extractive partnership structures, unpaid labor, or unfunded mandates. Systems protection should not romanticize resilience; it should name the conditions under which local actors are burdened with holding together what broader systems no longer sustain.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSudan\u0026rsquo;s distinctive lesson is therefore not merely that access is insufficient. It is that humanitarian action can inadvertently normalize a dangerous decoupling: partial service continuity coexisting with deeper protective-system erosion. If local actors are treated only as low-cost delivery channels, the relational and institutional functions they sustain remain invisible. If they are recognized as system-holders, however, then protecting the system includes protecting the conditions under which these actors can continue to carry memory, trust, and continuity.\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"7. Discussion and policy translation","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe argument developed here contributes to humanitarian debate in three ways. First, it reframes the problem of education and child protection in war from one of sectoral coordination alone to one of minimum protective function. Sudan demonstrates that the relevant question is not only whether services continue, but whether the functions that make those services protective remain intact. This is narrower and more operational than the familiar claim that access alone is insufficient.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSecond, the article clarifies the relationship between systems protection, systems strengthening, and resilience. Where violence is active, institutions are fragmented, and funding is sharply constrained, strengthening and transformation may be limited horizons. In such contexts, preserving minimum protective function may be the more realistic and ethically urgent objective. This does not make strengthening or resilience irrelevant; it relocates them in time and purpose.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThird, the argument carries practical implications for humanitarian programming and monitoring. If systems protection is taken seriously, agencies should not create an entirely new bureaucracy. Instead, they should extend existing cluster and inter-agency reporting so that a small set of indicators captures whether minimum protective function is intact, degraded, or collapsed. Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e proposes a pragmatic monitoring framework aligned to the five dimensions set out above.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab2\" border=\"1\"\u003e \u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 2\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePractical monitoring framework for minimum protective function [Place Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e. Practical monitoring framework for minimum protective function]\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/div\u003e \u003c/caption\u003e \u003ccolgroup cols=\"4\"\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003cthead\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eDimension\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePractical monitoring indicator\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePossible existing data source\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSuggested frequency\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/th\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/thead\u003e \u003ctbody\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eSafe access\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePercentage of planned education/protection activities cancelled for access or safety reasons\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCluster 4Ws, site reports, access logs\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMonthly\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eReferral continuity\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eProportion of referrals receiving documented feedback within agreed timeframe\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eCase management/referral tracking\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMonthly or quarterly\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eStaffing/records/coordination\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eStaff turnover in key frontline posts and proportion of coordination actions with documented follow-up\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eHR tracking, meeting minutes\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eQuarterly\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePhysical/social infrastructure\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eNumber of functioning sites with stable communication and identified trusted focal points\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eFacility mapping, partner site reports\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMonthly\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003ctr\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e \u003cp\u003ePublic duty-bearing\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eExtent of public institutional participation in planning, referral, or oversight functions\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eMeeting attendance, MoUs, role mapping\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e \u003cp\u003eQuarterly\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/td\u003e \u003c/tr\u003e \u003c/tbody\u003e \u003c/colgroup\u003e \u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThese indicators are intentionally simple. None requires wholly new data architecture. All could be embedded in existing cluster reporting, partner dashboards, or periodic coordination reviews. Their value lies less in precision than in shifting attention. They allow agencies to ask not only how many people were reached, but whether the functions that make those services protective are being preserved or lost. In principle, some of these indicators could replace weaker proxy metrics rather than merely supplement them, thereby limiting additional reporting burden.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMonitoring frameworks, however, are not politically neutral. Used ethically, they can make systemic decay visible before collapse occurs; used poorly, they can become tools of performative accountability that simulate oversight while protecting institutions from substantive change. Systems protection therefore requires not only indicators but ethical application and interpretation. One concrete safeguard is that indicator review should involve local partners and relevant public actors wherever feasible, so that thresholds are interpreted against context and not turned into perverse incentives for superficial compliance.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis also has implications for localization and humanitarian substitution. Recent JIHA scholarship points to the relational character of capacity sharing and the structural impediments to genuine localization (Khan and Kontinen 2022; Tilli et al. 2026). Systems protection complements those debates by offering a criterion for judging whether humanitarian partnership forms are preserving or eroding continuity. If a response increases output while reducing public duty-bearing, administrative memory, or trusted local interfaces, then it may be effective in the short term yet corrosive in systemic terms.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThere are, however, important limits to the framework. Systems are not neutral goods. Institutions can reproduce exclusion, inequity, and abuse; local structures can also be hierarchical or discriminatory. Systems protection is therefore not a normative defence of every existing system. Its value lies in diagnosing which minimum functions are necessary to keep children visible, connected, and protected, while remaining attentive to the harms some institutional arrangements may themselves produce.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSudan ultimately underlines a broader challenge for humanitarianism: the tension between what is measurable and what is protective. Coverage, caseloads, attendance, and activity counts are indispensable under emergency conditions. Yet if they become the dominant language of success, the loss of minimum protective function can remain invisible until its consequences are severe. Systems protection seeks to correct that imbalance by restoring attention to the connective architecture through which children\u0026rsquo;s learning and safety remain possible in war.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e. \u003cb\u003ePractical monitoring framework for minimum protective function\u003c/b\u003e\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003e[Place\u003c/b\u003e Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e. \u003cb\u003ePractical monitoring framework for minimum protective function]\u003c/b\u003e\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"8. Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eSudan\u0026rsquo;s war reveals a critical divergence: humanitarian services may continue in fragments while the minimum functions that make those services protective continue to erode. This article argued that the divergence cannot be adequately addressed through access-centred response alone. What is at stake is not merely the restoration of activity, but the preservation of minimum protective function between education, child protection, referral, coordination, social infrastructure, and public duty-bearing.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe conceptual contribution of the article is to define systems protection as analytically distinct from systems strengthening and resilience. Where strengthening seeks improvement and resilience concerns adaptive capacity, systems protection focuses on threshold preservation under active institutional erosion. The empirical contribution is to show how Sudan\u0026rsquo;s war produces partial service continuity alongside deeper protective-system erosion and how this condition is reproduced through funding, reporting, security, and substitution dynamics. The policy contribution is to provide a practical monitoring framework through which agencies can assess whether the functions that make services protective remain intact.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe article also argued for epistemic modesty. It does not substitute structural analysis for children\u0026rsquo;s voices, nor does it treat institutions or local structures as inherently benign. Rather, it offers a bounded lens for understanding what must remain intact\u0026mdash;or be deliberately reconnected\u0026mdash;if humanitarian action is to do more than deliver fragments. For donors as well as operational agencies, the implication is concrete: preserving minimum protective function is not only ethically preferable, but often materially less costly than rebuilding collapsed systems after avoidable erosion has already set in.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFuture research should test and refine the systems-protection framework through participatory and action-oriented work with Sudanese education and protection actors across contrasting conflict settings.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEthics approval and consent to participate:\u003c/strong\u003e Not applicable. This article is based on publicly available humanitarian and policy documentation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eConsent for publication:\u003c/strong\u003e Not applicable. The author declares that there are no competing interests.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFunding:\u003c/strong\u003e No outside funding was used to support this work.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCompeting interests:\u003c/strong\u003e The author declares no competing interests.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAuthor Contribution:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003eM.H. M. Musa conceived the article, conducted the analysis, drafted the manuscript, and approved the final version.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eArega, N. T. (2023). Mental health and psychosocial support interventions for children affected by armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review. \u003cem\u003eChild \u0026amp; Youth Care Forum\u003c/em\u003e, 52(6), 1431\u0026ndash;1456. 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Needs for capacity sharing in humanitarian responses: Qualitative study on experiences of professional and voluntary workforce. \u003cem\u003eJournal of International Humanitarian Action\u003c/em\u003e, 11, Article 10. Available at: \u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003ehttps://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-026-00193-4\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTol, W. A., Le, P. T. D., Harrison, S. L., Galappatti, A., Annan, J., Baingana, F. K., et al. (2023). Mental health and psychosocial support in humanitarian settings: Research priorities for 2021\u0026ndash;30. \u003cem\u003eThe Lancet Global Health\u003c/em\u003e, 11(6), e969\u0026ndash;e975. Available at: \u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003ehttps://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(23)00128-6\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eTruppa, C., Saulnier, D. D., Bertone, M. 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Available at: \u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003ehttps://www.unhcr.org/news/briefing-notes/three-years-war-weary-sudanese-remain-move\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eYu, R., Perera, C., Sharma, M., Ipince, A., Bakrania, S., Shokraneh, F., et al. (2023). Child and adolescent mental health and psychosocial support interventions: An evidence and gap map of low- and middle-income countries. \u003cem\u003eCampbell Systematic Reviews\u003c/em\u003e, 19(3), e1349. Available at: \u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003ehttps://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1349\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eZulkaphil, L. (2026). An analytical framework for examining the ethical dimensions of innovative humanitarian finance. \u003cem\u003eJournal of International Humanitarian Action\u003c/em\u003e, 11, Article 9. Available at: \u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003ehttps://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-026-00195-2\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":true,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"Sudan, education in emergencies, child protection, systems protection, minimum protective function, localization, humanitarian governance","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9540589/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9540589/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"Sudan’s war is not only a crisis of unmet need but a crisis of institutional erosion in which the minimum protective functions connecting education, child protection, referral, coordination, and public duty-bearing are progressively stripped away. This article argues that access-centred humanitarian response, while necessary, is insufficient where fragmented service continuity coexists with the collapse of the structures that make services protective over time. To address this problem, the article proposes systems protection as a bounded analytic lens for identifying and preserving minimum protective function in contexts where systems strengthening and resilience agendas are not yet operationally attainable. Methodologically, the article uses a critical practitioner policy analysis with documentary triangulation, drawing on OCHA’s Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026, UNHCR displacement reporting, IPC food insecurity analysis, and relevant scholarship on education in emergencies, psychosocial support, humanitarian governance, localization, and systems in fragile settings. The article makes three contributions. Conceptually, it distinguishes systems protection from systems strengthening and resilience by focusing on threshold preservation under active institutional erosion. Empirically, it shows how Sudan’s war has produced partial service continuity alongside deeper protective-system fragmentation. Policy-wise, it offers a practical monitoring framework through which agencies can assess whether minimum protective function is intact, degraded, or collapsed without creating substantial additional reporting burden. In practical terms, the framework is intended to help agencies identify when service continuity no longer corresponds to protective continuity.","manuscriptTitle":"Beyond Access: Education, Child Protection, and Minimum Protective Function in Sudan’s War","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2026-04-28 05:12:27","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-9540589/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"7174f4b8-7c8a-4e2c-8d8e-ceee687e9df9","owner":[],"postedDate":"April 28th, 2026","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"4","date":"2026-05-04T13:25:54+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2026-04-30T05:42:23+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-05-04T13:38:31+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2026-04-28 05:12:27","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-9540589","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-9540589","identity":"rs-9540589","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}