Malia Robinson has been a humanitarian child protection practitioner for nearly 20 years. She holds a Master’s degree in Political Science, with a focus on peace and conflict studies and child rights, from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, as well as a Peace Studies Diploma from Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany.
Both her professional life and volunteer activities have focused on learning how communities develop a sense of agency in the forces influencing their lives. This work has included building dialogue between the Native Hawaiian community and other communities sharing their homeland, working with local communities to reintegrate children associated with fighting forces and armed groups, and helping communities to develop plans to ensure the safety of their children in the event of natural disaster, among others. Her current interests include strengthening community-level child protection to meaningfully engage with communities and build on their approaches to protecting their children, and involving children in this engagement authentically. She is also interested to explore elements of climate change and impacts of disaster risk in all humanitarian settings, with its potential to exacerbate existing risks to the protection and psychosocial well-being.
