This document highlights examples of good practices in parenting and family strengthening interventions based on evaluations of programs and initiatives throughout Africa.

This chapter first traces the etymology of the definition of “orphan” and its attendant “crises.” Then, using examples from Guatemala and Uganda, the authors consider how the idea of an “orphan crisis” has traveled from development to charitable responses and what effects this has on local child protection systems.

This video investigates Nigeria’s “baby farms,” an industry in which young pregnant women are lured into “orphanages” with the promise of shelter, meals, and basic care and, in return, are coerced into giving up their babies at birth.

In this short video, Amanda Thorsteinsson documents the proliferation of orphanages in Uganda and the role of well-intentioned Westerners in contributing to this problem. 

The Independent Review Panel on UN Response to Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Foreign Military Forces in the Central African Republic released a report detailing the United Nations' "gross institutional failure" to act on allegations that Fre

Published jointly with UNICEF, this new BCN Working Paper focuses on the role of gatekeeping in strengthening family-based care and reforming alternative care systems. This Working Paper reviews different approaches to gatekeeping in five countries--Brazil, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Moldova, and Rwanda--to consider what has and has not worked, to analyze lessons learned from practice, and to reflect on the implications for improving policy and programs in this area.

In this short video, BBC News interviews Gramboute Ibrahima, a local social worker who helps child trafficking victims in Abengourou, Ivory Coast. His organisation, CREER, has opened the region's first centre to help rehabilitate trafficked children. Almost every country in the world is affected by human trafficking. Children are particularly at risk, often sold across borders to work in brothels or on farms. 

Many children in Uganda are taken to Europe and the United States for adoption every year by guardians who pay local law firms and agencies between four to nine million shillings. The law firms and agencies have consequently turned adopt

This article recounts the story of two children who spent the first five years of their lives in Rwanda’s largest and oldest orphanage, the Noel Orphanage. With support from the Ishema Mu Muryango (“Pride for the Family”) program in Rwanda, the children have been reunited with their older sister. Ishema Mu Muryango receives support from USAID’s Displaced Children and Orphans Fund and aims to reintegrate children from institutions into their families or communities.

This article from the BBC tells the story of one family, and many others like it, in a small town in Burkina Faso where it has become customary for men to migrate to Italy for work, leaving wives and children behind.