The reintegration of child soldiers is the key to achieving lasting prosperity and peace in conflict-affected societies. Unfortunately, a small fraction of child soldiers receive the necessary 3-5 years of support needed to reintegrate successfully into society. To address this, both immediate and long-term investments are crucial in providing humanitarian and developmental assistance and to tackle the root causes of recruitment to break and mitigate the vicious cycles that expose children to continued violence.

Despite an USD 80 million increase in yearly humanitarian funding since 2016, child reintegration efforts remain critically underfunded. In fact, humanitarian appeals supporting the umbrella “child protection” list of needs increased by USD 317 million yearly. As such, the gap between growing needs and current levels of funding has grown to a sheer 75% funding gap in 2021. Meanwhile, despite increasing reintegration needs in the CAAC agenda, peace funding has steadily declined since 2012. Simply addressing these needs in isolation is inadequate.

Our research identifies root causes of child recruitment, with 33% of these drivers expected to worsen due to climate change. Interestingly, there is a strong negative correlation between the increasing performance of indicators related to these drivers and the levels of child recruitment and use, particularly in violence-prone and lower-income countries.