Nigeria

Foster Care India - an NGO operating in Rajasthan, India aimed at helping the children in need of care and protection in the area through advocacy across Rajasthan and collaborations at local, state, national and global levels - has launched its newest website.

The theme of “Ensuring the Rights of the Child, and Family-based Services” chosen for the IFCO 2014 European Conference invites workshop ideas, plenary topics and attendees who envision foster care, and indeed, all alternative care as the holistic system that IFCO promotes.

This Masters thesis paper, by Michael Maher King of the University of Oxford, reviews the situations of children in institutional alternative care in Israel and Japan.

Officials in Hanoi have recently investigated a philanthropic institution, Bo De Pagoda, which housed children and older adults and have found that the institution “suffered loose management and offered substandard healthcare” in addition to allegations of child trafficking, says Ha An of Than Nien News. 

This video features a segment of a talk on the effects of care environments on children, hosted by the Christian Alliance for Orphans. The key speakers featured include Dr. Kathryn Whetten & Dr. Charles Nelson, who discuss the Positive Outcomes for Orphans study (POFO) and the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), respectively.

Assessment of the current status of Alternative Care Legislation, Standards and Practices and identified Gaps in six countries: Kenya, Malawi, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

In this opinion piece, Sarah Sagley Klotz shares her experience of growing up in a small Christian community in the US, learning about the needs of the world from sermons and videos, and later fully realizing the hardships of vulnerable and orphaned children in the developing world through her travels to Mongolia and North Africa. 

Following a consultative mapping, a regional learning meeting took place on 19-20 August 2014 in Nairobi, Kenya. The theme of this meeting was "Reflection on past, current and future efforts aimed at strengthening child care systems in East and Southern Africa." 

This report provides an overview of a two-day regional consultancy on strengthening child care systems in Eastern and Southern Africa.

SAVE THE DATE!  19-20 August 2014, Nairobi, Kenya