The inter-agency team released new joint estimates for child stunting, overweight, underweight, wasting and severe wasting (March 2020 edition) using the same methodology as in previous years.

In this study from the Lancet, the authors estimate the additional maternal and under-5 child deaths resulting from the potential disruption of health systems and decreased access to food.

This scientific brief examines the evidence to date on the risks of transmission of COVID-19 from an infected mother to her baby through breastfeeding as well as evidence on the risks to child health from not breastfeeding.

This UN brief examines the COVID-19 pandemic's threats to food security and nutrition of millions of people around the world and suggests three mutually reinforcing sets of priority actions to address the immediate, near- and medium-term needs to protect people during and beyond the crisis, and – ultimately – to reshape and build resilient food systems.

This course is for caregivers and professional service providers working with children with disabilities, children at risk of family separation, or children in alternative care. SPOON designed this free course to unpack the components of mealtime that can be used for screening, how to differentiate food textures, and how to identify feeding difficulties and opportunities to support caregivers.

El objeto que tiene la «Ley Marco Regional» es crear un marco jurídico y rector que contribuya a una migración segura, ordenada y regular, basada en el respeto, garantía y realización efectiva de los derechos humanos de las personas migrantes en todas las fases del proceso migratorio en el contexto de la migración, con especial atención a poblaciones en condiciones de vulnerabilidad, en la región de Centroamérica, la Cuenca del Caribe y México.

This brief provides an overview of the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and Migration Hub, established by Save the Children in Panama to support migration work in the region.

El objetivo de este estudio es visibilizar la problemática de la niñez y adolescencia víctima de violencia generalizada en condición de desplazamiento interno en El Salvador.

Co-sponsored by Bread for the World, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and 1,000 Days, this webinar heard first-hand accounts from a doctor on the front lines; from a researcher who is a core member of the Standing Together for Nutrition coalition and studying program adaptations in the context of the pandemic; and from a storyteller who shared best practices (and turnkey resources) to bring these stories to life to inspire leaders to act.

The authors of this comment explore their initial analyses and estimates regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's nutrition and note that these projections emphasise the crucial need for actions to protect child nutrition.

In this blog post, the authors call attention to the "malnutrition epidemic" that the world's children are currently facing, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This comment piece from the Lancet describes the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's nutrition, noting that vulnerable families, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are struggling to access the food and services they need in the context of an economic downturn.

"New data show that an unprecedented number of children in the United States are experiencing food insecurity and did not have sufficient food as of late June," writes Lauren Bauer in this blog post for the Brookings Institution.

This report summarizes some of the major accomplishments, challenges, and lessons learned from the Foster Youth Strategic Initiative, which aimed to ensure that older youth in foster care in Los Angeles County (LA) and New York City (NYC) become self-sufficient and thriving adults.

A group of young people with care experience came together on a webinar on June 6, 2020 and developed this set of commitments and recommendations specific to the issues affecting children and youth from alternative care settings globally.

El presente estudio aborda la realidad del impacto de la migración forzosa en niños, niñas y adolescentes venezolanos.

This Module explores how cognitive and social-emotional abilities operate in youth’s daily experience and personal lives and what we can do to help young people develop and strengthen these skills in order to thrive.

This paper is divided into two parts: The first details the evidence from the ground, painting the picture of life for children during the pandemic in different European countries with statistics and examples, and giving a set of recommendations on measures that national governments across Europe can take to help protect children from the worst impacts of the crisis relating to the economic impacts on families, loss of services, access to education and targeted measures for children in migration. The second part focuses on recommendations to the EU institutions on how EU policy and funding can support and complement these national-level actions in these challenging times.

This Scoping Study and Sector Review, produced under the guidance of the Ministry of Employment, Social Affairs and Family (MESAF) of Somaliland and Save the Children, is a strategic analysis of the existing policy landscape in Somaliland in order to inform the development of a Social Protection system.

This policy brief from Save the Children outlines the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted children's education in West and Central Africa and offers recommendations for reinforcing the efforts made by government to reach the most vulnerable.

This report describes key trends in migrations in the region, detailing information about the number of people on the move, demography (age, sex, country of origin, etc), behavioral patterns, and routes in use - with a focus on children, particularly unaccompanied children.

This report summarises the findings of an international study of the ethical challenges faced by social workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, undertaken during 6th-18th May 2020.

Esta infografia demuestra el proceso de integración de niños, niñas, y adolescentes (NNA) en familias de acogimiento temporal en Guatemala durante la pandemia de COVID-19.

This report finds that children in Uganda are increasingly vulnerable and at risk from an in crease in violence and abuse, stress, poverty, and hazardous coping strategies such as child labour and child marriage during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, vulnerable children have less support than usual. 

This report from the Fostering Network presents findings from a rapid response survey for foster carers and fostering services across the UK that sought to understand fostered children’s experiences of education during the pandemic.

This thematic policy brief from Save the Children and Plan International aims to seek and secure commitment from regional and national leaders to urgently prioritize and invest consistently in the protection of girls, who are disproportionately exposed to multitude forms of violence and their devastating consequences.

This treatment-process research aims to (1) identify profiles of families participating in intensive family intervention programs, based on youth and family characteristics and (2) compare the intervention received by families with different clinical profiles.

The vision of the National Prevention and Response Plan is to foster a society where all children live free of all forms of violence. Its goal is for all children in Kenya to be protected from physical, sexual and emotional violence, and for those children who experience violence to have access to care, support and services. It aims to reduce the prevalence of childhood violence – that is, a child experiencing at least one form of physical, emotional and sexual violence – by 40 per cent by 2024.

This conference seeks to explore how such diverse perspectives can inform a new ethics of adoption and the care of orphaned or abandoned children in Muslim communities.

El presente informe reúne los hallazgos principales de una investigación de carácter exploratorio-descriptivo que ha sido desarrollada en seis países de la región (Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Colombia, México y Perú). El objetivo fue documentar y analizar las políticas, estrategias y acciones desarrolladas para promover y acompañar la transición de adolescentes desde el sistema de cuidados alternativos hacia la vida autónoma.

Este video describe brevemente la investigación de la Red Latinoamericana de Egresados de Protección coordinado por DONCELque estudió cómo se dan los egresos de las y los adolescentes que crecieron bajo el sistema de protección del Estado, lejos de sus familias por haber sufrido abusos, maltratos y violencia.

In this webinar, Dr. Larry Grummer-Strawn, Technical Officer Dept. of Nutrition and Food Safety at the World Health Organization (WHO), presents to the International Coalition for Advocacy on Nutrition (ICAN) regarding the official guidance, challenges, and concerns with promoting, protecting, and supporting breastfeeding in the time of COVID-19.

1,000 Days, with support from Zero to Three and their Think Babies Campaign, has created this resource, Nutrition in the First 1,00 Days, to focus on the importance of investing in nutrition during this foundational period.

The Breastfeeding Advocacy Toolkit (the Toolkit) is intended to ensure stakeholders are able to easily access and use advocacy tools aimed at improving policies and financing for the protection, promotion, and support of breastfeeding. 

This year’s Global Nutrition Report examine the global burden of malnutrition with an equity lens to develop a fuller understanding of nutrition inequalities. In doing this, the report pinpoints and prioritises key actions to amplify efforts and propel progress towards ending malnutrition in all its forms.

This brief presents the key findings from the LEGACY Program Randomized Controlled Trial. The Legacy Maternal and Child Cash Transfer (MCCT) aimed to improve nutrition outcomes for mothers and children through the delivery of nutrition-sensitive cash transfers to pregnant women in Myanmar during the First 1,000 Days.

This experimental evaluation of the LEGACY program - a program implemented in three townships across Myanmar’s central dry zone that provided monthly cash transfer to mothers in their last two trimesters of pregnancy until the child turns two years old, as well as a monthly Social and Behavioral Change Communication (SBCC) activity supplementing the cash transfers, covering a range of topics related to nutrition and child health - measures the program's impact on child nutrition.

This paper draws upon lessons from SPOON Foundation's work in 17 countries since 2008, summarizing the main nutrition considerations for children in alternative care and offering recommendations on integrating nutrition and feeding practices into alternative care programs. This paper also explores ways that nutrition can support the global movement to ensure every child has family-based care, while meeting the immediate needs of the millions of children currently in all types of alternative care.

This preliminary scoping study aimed to explore approaches to family partnering within Australian therapeutic residential care (TRC), along with elements of best practice.

The goal of the present study was to better understand the impact of the pandemic and associated response measures on vulnerable children and families and provide data-informed recommendations for public and private service providers working with this population.

The objective of this Agreement is to overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people so that their life outcomes are equal to all Australians. Target 12 of this Agreement is to "by 2031, reduce the rate of over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care by 45 per cent."

This brief from UNICEF outlines what we need to know about COVID-19 and people with disabilities and what needs to be done in order to address their needs.

This tool is designed as an assessment framework that assists practitioners to identify and analyze the key starting point dynamics and determine implications for strategy in their work to transition an organization's model of care of children from institutional to a non-institutional model.

This joint note is aimed at providing preliminary guidance to national and local authorities, school administrators and staff and implementing partners on how to take short-term measures to support, transform or adapt school feeding programmes in their efforts to safeguard the food security and nutritional status of school-aged children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This Brief is meant to provide information specific to services and programmes for the management of child wasting in the context of COVID-19, and it contains information that is not already available elsewhere.

This report from ODI and UNICEF critically reviews the case for universal child benefits (UCBs). It seeks to contribute to a burgeoning and lively debate on the (potential) role of UCBs as a policy instrument in the pursuit of child poverty reduction and universal social protection.

Family for Every Child, as part of its How We Care initiative, has developed a series on Psychosocial support for children and families during COVID-19, which highlights different approaches taken by three of its member organizations to providing essential psychosocial support to vulnerable children and families within the context of the pandemic.

Family for Every Child, as part of its How We Care initiative, has developed a series on Psychosocial support for children and families during COVID-19, which highlights different approaches taken by three of its member organizations to providing essential psychosocial support to vulnerable children and families within the context of the pandemic.

Family for Every Child, as part of its How We Care initiative, has developed a series on Psychosocial support for children and families during COVID-19, which highlights different approaches taken by three of its member organizations to providing essential psychosocial support to vulnerable children and families within the context of the pandemic.

In this online event, Family for Every Child members FSCE (Ethiopia), The Mulberry Bush (UK), Praajak (India) and CSID (Bangladesh) discussed children's care in the context of COVID-19.

This document builds on existing response action from several countries and case management task force agencies. It provides considerations for adapting Child Protection Case Management (CP CM) interventions to the COVID-19 pandemic and to better understand the important role of case management in the emergency.

The 31st edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's KIDS COUNT® Data Book describes how children across the United States were faring before the coronavirus pandemic began. As always, policymakers, researchers and advocates can continue using this information to help shape their work and build a stronger future for children, families and communities.

This one-page factsheet from the Annie E. Casey Foundation makes the case for supporting kinship care during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers suggestions on how to support kin families, find funding to support these families, and embark on new partnerships.

This guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is designed to support the continuation and improvement of efforts to ensure a stable home and caregiver for children in the child welfare system - which are important to nurturing their development and preventing trauma that can affect a child across the lifespan - so that all children and families may flourish.

This article reports on a study of children's experiences of being physically restrained by staff in a range of custodial settings, including Local Authority Secure Children's Homes, in the UK.

This working paper gives an overview of the key issues and challenges facing both parents and after-school programs and child care providers as they try to ensure that school-age children are safe, supervised, and able to engage in quality distance learning while their parents work.

Capitalizing on a unique survey in China, the authors of this article aim to study the lasting educational and health consequences of parental migration on children.

This study examined rural children’s well-being, particularly their physical well-being, as functions of parental absence, family economic status, and neighborhood environment.

This volume adopts a context-informed framework exploring risk, maltreatment, well-being and protection of children in diverse groups in Israel.

This study examines how food insufficiency relates to HIV infection among caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in Tanzania.

The purpose of this study from the journal of African Health Sciences was to assess the level of household hunger and associated factors among orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) households in Lagos State, Nigeria.

This exploratory study provides early research to understand the relationship between levels of meaning-making and well-being in kinship caregivers.

The aim of this study was to describe the language and literacy profiles of adolescents (aged 13–19) in out-of-home care (‘looked after children’) in Australia.

The purpose of this evidence synthesis is to examine the impact of school closures on the protection and wellbeing of children globally, with a focus on the majority world.

This edition of The State of the World’s Children report examines children, food and nutrition. It seeks to deepen understanding around the causes and consequences of children’s malnutrition in all its forms and to highlight how governments, business, families and other stakeholders can best respond.

This study explores global growth suppression among children within institutional care settings.

This short essay presents unwed single mothers’ increased vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of childcare, financial crisis, and mental health.

This study examined deinstitutionalisation in Thailand. Qualitative interviews were conducted with a total of 27 child welfare practitioners and policy actors to explore their perceptions of Thai alternative care provision.

The 2020 edition of The Global Report on Food Crises describes the scale of acute hunger in the world, including for vulnerable children.

This study is based on a review of the documented history of Tennessee’s child welfare reform and informed by the reflections and perspectives of many who played key roles in the litigation and related system improvement efforts.

Para ayudarle a los sistemas de primera infancia en los E.E.U.U. a aprender a trabajar con padres de maneras que promuevan resultados equitativos y maximicen las oportunidades para todos los niños 40 padres líderes y personal de agencias de nueve comunidades de Early Childhood Learning and Innovation Network for Communities (EC-LINC) se reunieron en enero de 2018 para crear un manifiesto para el cambio.

To help early childhood systems in the U.S. learn to work with parents in ways that promote equitable outcomes and maximize opportunities for all children, 40 parent leaders and agency staff from nine Early Childhood Learning and Innovation Network for Communities (EC-LINC) communities came together in January 2018 to create a manifesto for change.

This project, designed to explore parenting practices across various regions within Zambia, aims to further advance ongoing efforts to support early childhood development (ECD) by informing parenting programmes intended to promote optimal child development.

This report provides a brief analysis of social sector spending in Zambia.

The purpose of this assessment is (a) to review existing case management systems within and in relation to the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS) in Zambia and (b) make recommendations on how case management can be enhanced to ensure more efficient and effective service delivery to vulnerable children and adolescents. 

This report details the end of programme evaluation Government of the Republic of Zambia-United Nations Joint Programme on Social Protection as a way of understanding and assessing its operational context and the effect the technical assistance had on the implementation of National Social Protection Policy (NSPP) during the programme’s lifetime.

Cracks in the System is a new report from Lumos that is the first of its kind to systematically explore the links between institutional care and child trafficking in Europe.

In partnership with the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, the upEND movement works to create a society in which the forcible separation of children from their families is no longer an acceptable solution for families in need.

This report from Child's i Foundation provides an overview of the organisation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Uganda.

The current study employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to guide the analysis of semi-structured interviews with eight young people with a range of care experiences, looking at the topic of confiding in others.

In this article, two case studies chart show that if foster carers are able to reflect upon the painful and unwanted feelings evoked in them, and acknowledge and take responsibility for what has become enacted in the placement, there may be an opportunity for harmful dynamics to be processed and repaired.

This paper explores within group differences for Mexican and Puerto Rican mothers vulnerable to child welfare involvement.

This study aimed to systematically review motivational interviewing (MI) with child welfare (CW) families as well as MI training with CW workers and social work students training to become CW workers.

This article explores in-home video chat between children and their incarcerated parents as a potentially viable option for building relationships during incarceration, especially when opportunities for positive physical contact are limited or non-existent.

This article charts the UK history of contact in fostering and adoption as it relates to children in care and their birth relatives.

This chapter provides an overview of one of the key factors implicated in young people’s contact with the criminal justice system: the criminalisation of children with care experience.

Using data from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study, the criminal offending trajectories of 678 incarcerated youth were examined. A history of foster care predicted membership in a high rate chronic offending trajectory.

This article describes what type of families make up the Family Foster Care resource of the Province of Alicante and their parenting styles.

This study aims to answer two research questions: a) How do youth and staff/professionals define/conceptualize authentic youth engagement (AYE)? and b) What are youths’ and staff/professionals’ recommended strategies for authentically engaging youth?

The goals of this article were to (a) examine the changes in educational achievements of children in care from preschool through the end of primary school; (b) identify subgroups exhibiting distinct educational trajectories; and (c) explore key predictive individual, care, and school characteristics.

This research brief summarizes the findings of a rapid review that collates and synthesizes evidence on the child protection impacts of COVID-19 and previous pandemics, epidemics and infectious disease outbreaks.

This paper argues that whilst statutory services have expanded then contracted, children’s charities have remerged as the most influential voices that have shaped twenty-first century child protection policy and practice in the UK.

Theoretically-informed focused commentary on the literature in this paper considers the position of children and young people as embedded within socio-ecological systems. The specific focus is on the educational disadvantage of children and young people susceptible to involvement from child protection and welfare services in the Republic of Ireland.

this study examines the relationship between needs, matched services, and child protective services (CPS) re-report. 

This qualitative study sought to understand the causes of separation among Syrian families in Jordan and the obstacles to family reunification.

The authors of this article sought to better understand the relationship between homelessness and child welfare services (CWS) involvement and examine whether homeless shelter data could combine with CWS data to enhance intervention targeting.

The authors of this article conducted a systematic review of the impact of parent-training interventions on children’s and caregivers’ cortisol levels, and meta-analyzed the results.

This brief article from Student Affairs Today highlights some of the lessons learned by student affairs professionals regarding foster care support programs at higher education institutions in the United States in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

This study assesses the magnitude of, and factors associated with undisclosed HIV status to a community-based HIV prevention program among caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in Tanzania.