This is the monthly update of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Learning Platform published in June 2023. 

In March 2022, Changing the Way We Care in partnership with the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection (MoLSP) launched a Working Group focused on strengthening the social service workforce in Moldova.

În martie 2022, Changing the Way We Care, în parteneriat cu Ministerul Muncii și Protecției Sociale (MMPS), a lansat un grup de lucru axat pe consolidarea forței demuncă în domeniul serviciilor sociale din Moldova.

In the project “Applying Safe Behaviours”, SOS Children’s Villages is working to enable children, young people and professionals to prevent and appropriately respond to peer violence amongst children and young people in alternative care and vulnerable families.

The practice of child marriage has continued to decline globally. Today, one in five young women aged 20 to 24 years were married as children versus nearly one in four 10 years ago.

Though research has been conducted on children with disabilities and on children in residential care settings, the intersections of these two topics has yet to be explored in depth. Notably, there is a lack of information surrounding disability measurement within residential care settings, highlighting a gap in the literature. It is estimated that a child with a disability is 17 times more likely to be placed in an institutionalized care setting than a child without a disability, and girls are more likely to be placed in an institution than boys. This report details research conducted in Kenya.

In the BBC interview below, parent activist Taliah Drayak presents key findings from the report: Children’s Social Care: The Way Forward. She describes her family’s own nightmare when social workers removed her two-year-old from her custody.