This presentation provides a background on the East African Community (EAC) Child Policy (2016) and describes the minimum standards and corresponding framework and strategies for providing services to children and young people within the East African Community. ​

This paper explores the ways that developmental science can inform and strengthen the child welfare system to better support the children, families, and communities it serves. 

This paper draws on the literature and practice examples from around the world to examine the fundamental challenges experienced by States in their efforts to implement the 'suitability principle,' as described in the Guidelines for the Alternative Care for Children. 

This presentation provides an overview of violence against children in residential care facilities in Africa. 

In this podcast episode, Annie E. Casey Foundation's Lisa Hamilton interviews Rafael López — the managing director of Accenture’s health and public services practice — about the challenges and opportunities for change in the American child welfare system.

This study examined language and psychosocial skills of Greek institutionalized children in comparison to children of the same age brought up in family-based care. 

language and psychosocial skills of Greek institutionalized children in comparis

This article explores the perspectives and programme needs of transition service providers (institutions and the government) in preparing and supporting adolescent girls leaving institutional care in Harare, Zimbabwe. 

This report presents the findings from  a secondary analysis of data from a comprehensive intervention in three baby homes in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. The analysis examined whether caregiver-child interaction quality, number of caregiver transitions, and group size mediated the impact of intervention on children's attachment behaviors and physical growth. 

This interim report from the Parliament of Australia's Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade presents its recommendations on the adoption of a Modern Slavery Act in Australia, with consideration to the trafficking, forced labor and child exploitation through orphanage tourism. 

This updated report presents the findings and recommendations from a study investigating the situation and experience of unaccompanied children in the UK's legal system. 

This study observed the physical growth and cognitive development in institutionalized toddlers in India, finding profound developmental delays in the sample group. 

This report presents and reviews 43 interventions addressing household violence within the context of humanitarian emergencies, including a range of programs focused on parenting education and support and economic strengthening. 

This paper presents the findings from a population-based, multi-stage random cluster knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) survey of child caregivers in Liberia, revealing the primary reasons for parent-child separation and common misconceptions about alternative care. 

This study examined the way adoption of children from out-of-home care is understood by the professionals involved in making decisions about their permanent care placements in Victoria, Australia. 

This guideline covers the identification, assessment and treatment of attachment difficulties in children and young people up to age 18 who are adopted from care, in special guardianship, looked after by local authorities in foster homes (including kinship foster care), residential settings and other accommodation, or on the edge of care. 

This study consulted with young people in Australia about their perspectives on what makes residential care safe and how safety could be improved within residential care. 

This guideline covers how organisations, professionals and carers can work together to deliver high quality care, stable placements and nurturing relationships for looked-after children and young people in England. 

This case study describes the coordinated care and case management system for highly vulnerable children and their caregivers implemented by the Yekokeb Berhan program in Ethiopia.

This case study describes the case management system developed by the Sustainable Comprehensive Responses for Vulnerable Children and their Families (SCORE) project in Uganda. 

This article highlights the challenges to reforming care policy and provides recommendations for those working to create policies that increase family-based care and decrease institutional care at the national level.

This publication provides a description of 4Children's approach to case management for children orphaned or made vulnerable to HIV and their families.

This document is based on a secondary data matrix compiled by the global Child Protection Area of Responsibility (CP AoR) and by the Global Education Cluster using the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action and the Minimum Standards for Education: Preparedness, Response, Recovery of the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) as an analysis framework.

This article presents the achievements of a care and support programme among orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in Bayelsa State, Nigeria as well as the implications for future programming. 

This article describes the findings of a four-year study with a cohort of children in out-of-home care in New South Wales and their experiences with the criminal justice system. 

This study investigated the psychosocial distress and coping mechanisms of institutionalized children living in New Delhi, India. 

This systematic review addresses violence and abuse experiences in institutionalised care, including frequency and type of abuse/violence, interventions addressing violence in institutional care, the perpetrators of violence, and the connections between abuse and cognitive delays in institutionalised children. 

A recent Canadian study on youth homelessness revealed that youth experiencing homelessness are 193 times more likely to report interactions with the child welfare system. This policy brief offers a snapshot of the situation for homeless youth with experience in care, an analysis of the structures and systems leaving these children behind, and recommendations for policy and practice. 

This report presents the findings from an assessment on the profile, drivers and intentions of refugee and migrant children who arrived in Italy and Greece in 2016 and 2017 and aims to enable Italian, Greek and European policy makers, local service providers and humanitarian actors to provide appropriate accommodations and services for migrant children.

This study explored the experiences of adoptive parents who chose to place their intercountry adopted child in out-of-home care due to the child's disability. 

This guide is aimed at informing policy makers and programme managers working across Eastern and Southern Africa to implement an integrated case management approach to practice with vulnerable children and their families. 

This report is a case study of the Child Wellbeing Project, which sought to address the reduction of services to families post-care compared to available in-care services to prevent foster care re-entry, ensure permanence, and improve long-term outcomes for children. 

This report is a case study on alternative care arrangements and deinstitutionalisation in Uganda. 

This desk review provides a brief mapping and summary of existing knowledge on alternative care and deinstitutionalisation in Africa. 

This document describes and provides guidelines for countries to implement the Household Vulnerability Prioritization Tool (HVPT), a tool developed in Uganda to identify and prioritize vulnerable households for enrollment in OVC programming. 

In this webinar recording, 4Children and KIDSS share learning about how to prepare and plan, at the family and programmatic level, for exiting out of OVC programs. 

Este recurso describe Ley 27.364 de Argentina, Programa de acompañamiento a jóvenes sin cuidados parentales.​

Commissioned by England's Department for Education, this review of the fostering system in England provides a look into the details of the foster care system, how it functions and how children in care are impacted by it, and identifies gaps and areas for improvement. 

This working document by the Initiative for Child Rights in the Global Compacts, a multilateral initiative supported by 26 organizations, provides goals, targets and indicators with respect to six priority issues involving refugee and migrant children. 

This document presents the data on intercountry adoptions to the United States in the Fiscal Year 2012, as per the U.S. State Department.

This qualitative study explored the emotional experiences of 15 adolescents placed in foster care in South Africa. 

This article presents the research of the project "Giving Young People a Voice: Advocacy in Children’s Homes," which evaluated the implementation of a visiting advocacy project and services provided by an independent advocate working in children's homes in Italy.  

This document serves as a guide for implementing short-term residential care interventions; grounded in evidence-based practice, the Guide provides "7 essential elements of short-term residential intervention" with case examples from the field in the United States.  

This report examines and shares learnings from ATD Fourth World UK's social work practice framework with families experiencing poverty, discussing its strengths-based collaborative approach to build relationships and reduce power imbalances between practitioners and families. Implications for the feasibility of implementing this framework in child protection social work practice and policy in Aotearoa New Zealand is also addressed. 

This study sought to identify child, carer, and intervention characteristics that contribute to child wellbeing for Aboriginal children in out-of-home care in Australia. The article also identifies enablers and barriers to providing trauma-informed and culturally competent care to Aboriginal children. 

This article presents the findings from the Mind Your Health study conducted in Northern Ireland, which analyzes the experiences of young people in care and their carers in accessing and engaging in mental health services. 

This article explores the protection of smuggled and trafficked unaccompanied minors under the United Nations Protocols against the Smuggling of Migrants and Trafficking in Persons and calls for a more substantive protection-based framework to address the issue. 

In this video, Philip Goldman, President of Maestral International, discusses how donors, faith communities, advocates and other committed actors can be brought together under the common belief that all children belong in families. 

This study investigated and compared electroencephalogram (EEG) functioning between a group of institutionalized adolescents and a never institutionalized group of adolescents during a social decision making task. 

This study investigated how adoptive and prospective adoptive parents in Spain deal with signs of fraud and corruption within the intercountry adoption process, illuminating the dismissal of the systemic failures of intercountry adoption and the rights of birth families. 

This paper is based on the findings from a qualitative study with orphaned children in South Africa, their teachers and caregivers, which investigated the capacity of extended families affected by poverty and HIV/AIDS to care for and support orphaned children. 

This article offers a framework for determining the best interests of the child in decision-making processes concerning children in migration procedures.

This paper offers recommendations for child welfare professionals, caregivers and systems to use the research on adolescent brain development to work effectively with youth in or emerging from foster care. 

The aim of this study was to identify the processes that support the good results obtained by the teenagers and young persons who reside in the largest residential centre in the county of Iași, Romania and their concerns regarding the future.  

This document describes the Support Program for Young People Ageing Out without Parental Care, Argentine National Law 27.364, adopted unanimously by The Senate and Chamber of Deputies of Argentina on May 31, 2017. 

El Senado y Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina reunidos en Congreso, etc. sancionan con fuerza de Ley: Programa de Acompañamiento para el Egreso de Jóvenes sin Cuidados Parentales. 

This study explores whether child and family-related factors are associated with later psychological problems in international adoptees in Finland. Researchers then investigated whether the length of time a child spends at home after adoption and before daycare moderates the aforementioned associations. 

This study assesses the impact of of official government intervention programmes in managing child vulnerability and Child Headed Households (CHHs) in South Africa. 

This article draws from three narratives of secret adoptions in Vietnam to further examine and analyze the complex nature and practices of domestic adoption in the country. 

This paper hopes to contribute to a sorely under-documented field of how to reintegrate institutionalized children back into the community in a post-conflict environment.

This policy document replaces various uncoordinated, sector-biased programmes developed and implemented by the Ministry of Education Youth and Sports, Ministry for Employment and Manpower Development, the Ministry of Health and, the Ghana National Commission on children and other Stakeholders. 

The overall goal of this case study is to provide in sufficient detail the process that follows from initial ideas/ vision, government policy development, the creation of national strategic plan of action, local (district-level) program and work plan development, and ultimately program implementation, including monitoring and evaluation (M&E).

This participatory baseline is part of a multi-country study commissioned by Save the Children targeting selected areas of Rwanda, Ethiopia and North-Sudan. The purpose of the multi-country study is to address the UN Study on Violence Against Children’s recommendations and assess the role of communities in ensuring that children are protected from violence and abuse at all levels. 

This is a report of the proceedings of PAN’s contributions to the 20th Anniversary of the International Year of the Family (and the 10th anniversary of the Plan of Action - PoA - on the family in Africa) through a Regional Experts meeting whose theme was dubbed “Restoring families as the Pillar of Development in Africa”. 

This book focuses on, and reviews, a selection of laws related to the rights of children in South Africa. 

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This presentation, delivered by Better Care Network Director Florence Martin at the 18-19 July #ChildrenCount17 conference, demonstrates the need for comprehensive national data systems, as well as what kind of data should be collected, barriers to thorough data collection, and examples of strong national-level efforts to collect comprehensive data on children living outside of family care. 

The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2017 reviews progress made towards the 17 Goals in the second year of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In the report, children outside family care are identified as a vulnerable group that remains largely invisible in national data counts. 

This study investigated the connection between past child protective services involvement and type of exit from care for youth in probation-supervised foster care. 

Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnography with unaccompanied migrant children and their families, this paper investigates how U.S. institutional policies of immigration detention and family reunification impact migrant children and their families. 

This briefing the first in a series describing a programme of the Howard League for Penal Reform, which is intended to clarify why so many children in residential care in England and Wales are being criminalised at higher rates than their peers and identify examples of best practice to prevent their unnecessary criminalisation. 

This study measured the effectiveness of a Positive Parenting and Sensitive Discipline program for mothers and their 10- to 36-month-old children placed in parental residential care. 

This study observes foster care re-entry for young people whose families participated in Cottage Housing Incorporated's Serna Village Program (CHI), a supportive housing program serving homeless families in Sacramento, California. 

This study explored the resilience of children living with HIV from the perspective of foster parents residing in a community in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. 

This report from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) provides data on migration throughout the EU from 1-30 June 2017. The report includes data on the child protection situation for migrant children, particularly the identification, emergency placement and accommodation of unaccompanied children. 

This overview report provides a summary of key findings and lessons from five detailed research papers investigating what has proven to improve outcomes for children in the child protection system, what programs and services are delivered locally in the child protection system, and what is known about the overall effectiveness of the child protection system. 

This video from MenCare Campaign describes the campaign's efforts in over 40 countries to overcome stigma, gender discrimination, and violence and empower men to become equal partners in caring for children. 

This guide is presented as a “toolbox” to help DDR actors respond to the needs of girls formerly associated with armed groups in eastern DRC, and to overcome the many obstacles to their release and reintegration, reported by some of the girls themselves.

This report presents the findings of research conducted by Child Soldiers International to assess the effectiveness of release, psychosocial recovery and reintegration interventions for girls associated with armed groups in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). 

This study sought to examine the factors associated with the length of foster parenting duration. Study results will contribute to developing implications for successful recruitment and retention policies and practices for foster parents.

In this video, One Sky Foundation describes its work to strengthen families and keep children out of children's homes in the Thai-Burma border district of Sangkhlaburi. 

This study intended to develop data regarding how families parent and nurture good behaviour in their children; whether they know what would constitute nonviolent (positive) discipline; and if they actually utilized the positive aspects of disciplining. The study was conducted in specific areas (study clusters) in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda. 

This report presents the methodology, findings and key learnings of a pilot study in Kiziba camp, Rwanda.

This report tracks the progress and celebrates the success of how a new child protection system - encompassing prevention, emergency hospital care, alternative family care (AFC) and permanent solutions - was introduced into an Islamic context.

This document is an adapted presentation created by Florence Martin of Better Care Network and Katie Rice of Save the Children UK describing the Tracking Progress Initiative.

This document summarizes the content of the 6-7 October 2016 Network Meeting of National Statistical Offices. The event comprised of a number of presentations on topics related to the SDGs and data on children in alternative care. 

This statistical release provides information about looked after children in England for the year ending 31 March 2016, including where they are placed, their legal status, the numbers starting and ceasing to be looked after, and the numbers who go missing or are away from their placement without authorisation. 

This analysis was produced as part of an independent review into children's residential care in England and provides data on children living in all types of residential care facilities in the country as of 31 March 2015. 

The U.S. Census Bureau's Demographic Analysis shows that young children (age 0 to 4) had a higher net undercount rate than any other age group in the 2010 U.S. Decennial Census. This paper identifies key patterns relative to the net undercount of young children in U.S. data and examines data available in other countries to see whether these data patterns exist in other country contexts. 

This article examines the discoursal shift to “reintegration” within trafficking protection programmes and policy, with emphasis upon Cambodia. 

This policy outlines the issues of voluntourism and orphanages in relation to child protection, and states the criteria by which organisations (private commercial companies, social enterprises and charities) involved in voluntourism activities may apply to join The Code.

The alternative care assessment examines the current social welfare systems and processes rather than on the specific quality of care in the various children’s homes as standards have already been developed.

This paper reports the findings of an Australian study that examined longitudinal data on reasons for entry to care, trajectories in care and patterns of reunification and associated factors.

The research which is the focus of this report involves systematic learning about existing CBCPMs and their linkage with formal, government led aspects of the wider child protection system.

This study examined the extent to which children and adolescents participated in decisions that affected them at the points of removal and reunification in the child protection process in Spain. 

This document includes the appendices for the Outcomes for Permanence and Stability for Children in Long-term Care study, which privides a complete picture of the study's research methods and quantitative data collected. 

The aim of this study was to explore how young people who have been in care, and their carers, conceptualise permanence and stability.

The purpose of this review document is to inform the development of an African Partnership for quality in the care of orphans and vulnerable children. By reviewing experiences to date in similar efforts, this review identifies best practices and challenges that may inform the development of a regional partnership focusing on quality.

This document contains the Procedures and Practice Guidelines for Foster Care and Adoption in Lesotho.