On 10 September 2014, UNICEF and the Permanent Mission of Bulgaria co-hosted a high level Lunchtime Discussion on The right of children below three years to live in a caring and supportive family environment: examples from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

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.

UNICEF Albania office wishes to invite applicants to submit a proposal for conducting an “Analysis of National Child Protection Systems in the Wider Context of the Social Protection System in Albania.”

The One Step Forward book is a visual guide to resilience, written and illustrated by young people in foster care.

In this chapter of the Handbook of Child Well-Being, the authors review the findings from research on the cognitive and social-emotional development of children growing up in institutions, foster care and adoption.

The toolkit provides the user with a comprehensive assessment framework for analyzing current systems, procedures, and practices against international standards and professional case management practices at both the case level and system level. This toolkit does not promote a specific model of case management since no one approach or model can be applied to every situation. Rather, it outlines the beneficial aspects, processes, and strategies of case management that have shown improved outcomes for children and families.

This paper examines the benefits and challenges of de-institutionalizing disability residential services in Croatia through Open Society Foundation’s Mental Health Initiative (MHI). 

This video from Al Jazeera English investigates the disappearance of 500 Albanian Roma children from a state-run residential institution in Athens, Greece over a decade ago. 

This study described the magnitude of physical abuse during childhood in a representative sample of young adults selected from public universities in Albania, and to identify relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and behavioural/lifestyle factors associated with adverse childhood experiences.

This presentation from Innocenti’s Expert Consultation on Family and Parenting Support includes an overview of family trends in the CEE/CIS region, some promising practices in social protection, and thoughts for going forward.