This is the monthly update of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Learning Platform published in February 2024. 

Amy and Ano are twins, but just after they were born they were taken from their mother and sold to separate families.They found out about each other by chance and as they delved into their past, they realised thousands of babies in Georgia were stolen from hospitals and sold for adoption, some as recently as 2005. Now they want answers.

This advocacy brief provides an overview of promising practices and lessons learned to end child immigration detention in the U.S. and sets out a range of policy actions needed to scale up efforts to end this form of violence.

Many young orphans in Zimbabwe grow up in residential care facilities, but according to governmental policies and literature in this field, these children should be transitioned to extended families to ensure optimal development. This article provides empirically derived insights to the inner experiences of the transition processes of five young orphans and their extended family members, two residential care administrators, and one social worker.

Norwegian youth in out-of-home care move three times as frequently as their peers. Such placement instability is linked to negative outcomes in terms of social attachment, well-being, educational achievements, health, and future opportunities. Norway implemented a new child welfare service reform in 2022 that increased the municipalities responsibilities for out-of-home care. This study evaluates how the implemented measures affect the number of moves within out-of-home care in Trøndelag county. Norway.

Shared parenting, when adults collaborate in childrearing, is a practice of interest for children in out-of-home care. Yet, little is known about its feasibility and outcomes for kinship families who have preexisting relationships with birth parents. This article shares qualitative results from focus groups that explored participants’ experiences and attitudes toward shared parenting in the U.S.

This is a report about the Parental Rights in Prison Project (PRiP) based in Wales and England aimed at supporting incarcerated parents who wished to sustain their relationship with their children who are in the care of the local authority, care of family and significant others or adopted and to provide them with legal advice and support around their rights as parents. 

The aim of this study was to examine whether different subtypes of homelessness risk exist among young people transitioning from care in Australia and whether these trajectories of homelessness are associated with mental health and substance use disorders.

This chapter, which is part of the "Handbook of Human Mobility and Migration" reviews the literature on child migration, highlighting how children compare from adults in their migratory aspirations and migration decision-making, as well as in their experiences in receiving countries in the European and US contexts, where groups of children such as unaccompanied minors benefit from humanitarian protections unavailable to adults.

This chapter is part of the "Research Handbook on Migration, Gender, and COVID-19" and explores the gender and youth dimensions of return from GCC States to the East Africa subregion, focusing on three countries: Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia.

This longitudinal study uses a causal effect model to examine, through decomposition, the relationship between care environment and HIV risk factors in orphaned and separated adolescents and youths (OSAY) in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya; considering resilience, social, peer, or family support, volunteering, or having one’s material needs met as potential mediators. The authors analysed survey responses from 1105 OSAY age 10–26 living in Charitable Children’s Institutions (CCI) (orphanages) and family-based care settings (FBS).

The aim of this research was to gain insight into the youth resilience factors promoting a successful transition to an independent life after living in alternative care in Croatia. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with eight young people who had experience living in alternative care and showed successful adaptation to an independent life.

This report presents findings from qualitative interviews conducted with English-speaking Latino individuals from the United States who experienced parental deportation between the ages of 6 and 17 years old. They offer suggestions about what they needed following their loss as a child. By understanding what children need in these moments of crisis, practitioners, providers, and others are better prepared to address this form of complex childhood adversity.

The Pathways of Care Longitudinal Study (POCLS) is the first large-scale prospective longitudinal study of children and young people in out-of-home care in Australia. It includes a cohort of all 4126 children and young people (age 0 to 17 years) who entered out-of-home care for the first time over an 18-month period from May 2010 to October 2011 in New South Wales, with a focus on 2828 of these children with final court orders.

This article outlines differing perspectives on orphanage tourism and volunteering from the last decade of research. It examines the contexts in which orphanage tourism occurs and outlines the drivers for this form of tourism. In addition, it discusses the implications of orphanage tourism for children including impacts on child agency, child rights, child development, child protection, and child trafficking and exploitation.

This chapter identifies some (but not all) of the common adversities that care-experienced young people often face living in England inclusive of changes in accommodation and placement instability, insecure relationships, poor mental health, disrupted education, substance misuse, and poverty in order to help educators understand the myriad of life challenges facing those with care experience.

The authors explore approaches, challenges, solutions, and recommendations offered by child welfare workers in Canada on remote communication with children/youth regarding safety and on managing parent–child access during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article explores how the monitoring of foster homes in Norway is experienced by children and youths who have been exposed to what they consider abusive behaviour by foster parents. Using a thematic narrative theoretical framework, the article shows that a common narrative in the youths’ accounts is a story of mistrust towards social workers and monitoring officers, which relates to a general mistrust towards the child welfare service.

Young people who age out of state care are at risk of a range of negative outcomes. In England, national data provides only five indicators of care leavers’ lives and there are no measures of how young people themselves feel about their transition to adulthood. To fill this gap a new survey to measure subjective wellbeing was coproduced with 31 care leavers. The survey was then distributed by 21 local authorities and completed by 1804 care leavers.

This qualitative study explores the emotional and social experiences of 10 children, aged 6–11, residing in foster care in Italy before adoption for almost three years. Through semi-structured interviews, the study underlined the needs and expectations of these children, highlighting the necessity for a deeper reflection on the role of foster homes as nurturing and educational communities.

This article analyzes ethical issues arising in transreligious foster care placements in relation to foster children’s needs regarding religious socialization and identification. Applying Urban Walker’s expressive-collaborative framework to 30 qualitative interviews with foster parents, foster children, parents, and professionals, the authors elaborate and apply a three-level reflection on Christian foster parents’ ethics of care in everyday practice of foster care.

Group climate in residential youth care is considered to be essential for treatment of youth and young adults. Various instruments exist to measure quality of living group climate, but some are lengthy, use complicated wording, which make them difficult to fill out by youth and individuals with a mild intellectual disability. The present study based in the Netherlands describes the development and rationale for the Group Climate Instrument—Revised (GCI-R).

This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals.

Family-centred practice (FCP) has been suggested as a best practice for treating youth with emotional and behavioural difficulties in residential care. In this preregistered global systematic review, the authors examined how FCP is operationalized and measured in residential youth care and which family outcomes are associated with FCP.