The U.S. government’s foreign assistance reductions and rescissions in 2025 are reshaping the global policy and financing landscape for children in adversity. This report, drawing on consultations with over 200 stakeholders, outlines strategies across four pillars to mitigate harm from the cuts and strengthen local capacity to support vulnerable children, families, and communities.

This historical overview documents milestones in the evolution of the U.S. government’s work to support the development, care, and protection of children globally, as well as coordination efforts across the U.S. government to promote a holistic response to the needs of vulnerable children. It draws on a review of publicly available documentation and conversations with numerous United States Agency for International Development (USAID) staff and partners involved in work on behalf of highly vulnerable children over more than three decades.

This report contains the findings from a nationally representative study conducted in 2025 by Barna Group of U.S. Christians to better understand U.S. Christian beliefs around and support for orphanages, children’s homes and other forms of residential care for children.

This article describes how UN human rights experts have expressed serious concern about historic illegal inter-country adoptions in Guatemala in which at least 80 Indigenous children were reportedly taken from an institution called Hogar Temporal Elisa Martínez after being captured or forcibly disappeared between 1968 and 1996, and later adopted abroad without proper consent or legal safeguards.

This review examines research on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected older youth with foster care experience in the United States, finding that most studies were descriptive and highlighted major disruptions in areas like housing, education, employment, mental health, and relationships. It shows that certain groups—such as youth of color, LGBTQ youth, and females—were especially impacted, and calls for stronger support systems and policies to better protect foster youth in future crises.

This article reports on Swedish adults who were adopted from Colombia decades ago and are now searching for their birth mothers after discovering that many international adoptions — involving around 60,000 children including nearly 5,700 from Colombia — were marred by irregularities such as false documentation, coerced consent, and children declared orphans when they were not, leaving adoptees without accurate identity information and grappling with psychological impacts of lost heritage.

This article describes how a new bipartisan U.S. congressional report finds that children with mental health needs are often incarcerated in juvenile detention centers across the country—sometimes without having committed any crime—because community-based mental health care and placement options are severely limited or unavailable.

This study compares the role of advocacy coalitions in forming child protection policies in the United States and Indonesia, looking at the problems that arise from their different political and governance systems. The findings show how important it is to improve inter-agency collaboration, strengthen local governance, and get more political support to fix the problems with child protection services

This paper introduces an Advocacy Reach Calculator developed by ChildFund International to estimate how many children and families benefit from child protection policy changes. It outlines the tool’s development and pilot testing in four countries, showing how it can support better monitoring, planning, and advocacy efforts.

This study examined the relationship between disability type and service receipt among U.S. transition-age youth aging out of foster care, a population in which 53% have a diagnosed disability, across all U.S. states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.