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. 

Changing the Way We Care prioritizes scaling family care as part of care reform. To support global efforts, CTWWC developed a conceptual framework to scaling within the countries where it works. The country-level conceptual framework presents scaling as a seven-step process. Scaling approaches vary across contexts and countries with there being no one-sized fits all approach.

This guidance aims to provide case workers and others at residential care facilities with the considerations they need to look at for the successful reunification and placement of children with disabilities into family care, including understanding disability and how it impacts children’s care, disability-inclusive case management, and preparing children with disabilities for reunification/placement.

This brief summarizes the original design of Changing the Way We Care’s family strengthening approach,  the  lessons  learned  during  implementation,  and  the adaptations  that  CTWWC  is  making  to  maximize  the  impact  of  its  family strengthening work.

This CTWWC brief describes the family strengthening approach and the people who work with families and children. It shares reflections from facilitators of parenting sessions and the caregivers, themselves.

Positive parenting programs are an important part of this package and are provided together with training in household finance, access to household economic strengthening opportunities, and referrals to other critical services such as child protection and disability support and helping families under stress feel supported and part of their local community. This brief describes the program and interventions.

Learnings #1: Positive Parenting and Care Reform in Kenya
 

This Changing the Way We Care Insights Learning Brief describes how systems strengthening alone can lead to scaling of interventions, including interventions that already exist.

This facilitator’s manual provides the detailed content for each session and should only be delivered by trained facilitators. For more information contact CTWWC through info@ctwwc.org or by SMS on 21437 

This guide is part of the Families Together parenting curriculum for families who have a child reintegrating into the home.

Families Together is a positive parenting program for use with families at risk of separation and families undergoing reintegration of children from residential care.

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This document makes the case for the importance of investing in family strengthening in countries across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It has a particular focus on support for families so that any unnecessary separation of children from their families and placement in alternative care can be prevented.