This report from SOS Children’s Villages assesses Malawi’s compliance with, and implementation of, the UN Guidelines on the Alternative Care of Children. 

Adoptive families are now using the Internet to give their unwanted adopted children over to complete strangers, some of whom are traffickers, pedophiles, child pornographers, or worse. This practice is known as private rehoming.

This presentation to the 2012 Sofia Conference introduces social services available in Belarus for the identification, intervention, care, and rehabilitation of children under the age of 3 with disabilities, in order to prevent their abandonment and placement in institutions.

This presentation to the 2012 Sofia Conference by Danica Kramarić, Head of Sector for the Promotion and Protection of Health, Croatian Ministry of Health, introduces how positive communication and engaged parenting are key deterrants of the placement of children with disabilities in institutions.

This presentation to the 2012 Sofia Conference by Darinka Yankova, Deputy Chairperson of the State Agency for Child Protection addresses the challenges and the new vision for the deinstitutionalization of children in the Republic of Bulgaria.

This presentation to the 2012 Sofia Conference by the Kuan Sabi Program, in Kazakhstan suggests ways to improve the knowledge and skills of Primary Health Care workers that care for children under the age of 3.

This presentation to the 2012 Sofia conference by Irakli Nadareishvili, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Labor Health and Social Affairs of Georgia, highlights the key initiatives of the deinstitutionalization and childcare system reform launched by Georgia in 2005, as well as the challenges faced in this process.

This presentation to the 2012 Sofia Conference by Valentina Buliga, Minister of Labor in Moldova, Social Protection and Family, introduces Moldova's ongoing collaboration between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labor to reduce infant mortality and the placement of children under the age of 3 in institutions.

The purpose of this review was to identify evidence-based early response strategies and interventions for improving the outcomes of children outside of family care, including children of and on the street, institutionalized children, trafficked children, and children affected by conflict and disaster, and who are exploited for their labor. A conclusion was drawn that there is a strong need for strengthening the evidence base regarding the effectiveness or early assessments and responses to children living outside family care and for using evidence to guide operational policy and practice.

The objective of this review was to strengthen the evidence-base for policy and practice for support of children outside of family care through effective, efficient and sustainable mechanisms for monitoring and evaluation. Findings show that fostering a stronger evidence-base to improve protection for vulnerable children requires evaluations that are integrated into program development, use context-appropriate methodologies able to assess intervention scalability and employ more longitudinal designs to explore children’s trajectories.