This webinar—hosted by the Transitioning Residential Care Working Group under the Transforming Children's Care Collaborative—brought together practitioners from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern and Southern Africa to explore how social norms shape efforts to transition away from residential care and how they can be effectively addressed.

Child abuse and neglect in urban Vietnam are strongly associated with socio-economic hardship and family vulnerabilities, including low income, residential instability, single-parent households, low parental education, and alcohol misuse. The study underscores the need for integrated, community-based interventions that address both structural inequalities and family-level risk factors to effectively prevent child maltreatment.

Developed to support efforts to strengthen the child protection system in the Philippines, this report documents two complementary approaches to delivering child protection services. Drawing on fieldwork, stakeholder consultations, and system analysis, the paper presents how local government-led Child Protection Centers and hospital-based Women and Children Protection Units provide integrated, child-focused, survivor-centered responses to violence against children.

This paper examines how broader economic and labour market forces influence family separation and the placement of children in residential care in Cambodia, amid ongoing child care deinstitutionalisation reforms. While global evidence highlights the harm caused by residential care and promotes family and community-based alternatives, Cambodia’s reform efforts remain largely reactive and institution-focused, paying limited attention to structural drivers of family separation.

This article reports on a new collaboration between the Catholic Church in Thailand and UNICEF to address ongoing gaps in child protection systems, particularly those affecting vulnerable and marginalized children in a context of persistent social

This article examines how child protection policy is implemented at the local level in North Central Timor, highlighting existing legal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and budget allocations. It finds that while regional governments have established regulations and programs, formal child protection policies are lacking at the village level despite some related activities supporting children’s rights.

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.

In Myanmar, concerns have been raised that clientelism may be facilitating the recruitment of children into unregistered facilities, putting children at risk. This study uses clientelism theory and examines relationships between stakeholders involved in forty-five residential care facilities in Myanmar. It finds clientelism as a distinct driver of child institutionalization in Myanmar and as a mechanism that facilitates the recruitment and admission of children into unregulated residential care facilities, undermining their rights and safety.

This article examines the legal status and consequences of concealing the ancestry of adopted children under Indonesian criminal law and Islamic law. It analyzes how such practices are addressed in statutory law and Islamic legal principles, highlighting the importance of lineage clarity, transparency, and the protection of children’s rights in adoption.