Community-based protection (CBP) empowers communities to obtain their rights safely and with dignity. By applying the CBP approach, crisis-affected communities and humanitarian actors can work together to better identify a community's most serious protection risks and explore causes and effects. It also enables the participation of communities in deciding on the best ways of responding to and preventing protection risks, thus increasing the impact and results of humanitarian interventions.

Adopting a community-based approach implies that communities, through consultation and participation, engage meaningfully and substantively in all aspects of decision-making that affects them including programming and design of interventions and that they play a leading role in bringing about sustainable change for their communities.

CBP is not just a matter of consulting communities, or their participation in assessment or information gathering. It is a continuous process that engages communities as analysts, evaluators and implementers in their own protection. As such, it can and should be integrated into humanitarian response programmes across sectors and in all humanitarian contexts.