This is the monthly update of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Learning Platform published in July 2022. 

This paper highlights the importance of placing support for children with disabilities and their families at the centre of care reform efforts, and provides examples from across the region of how this can be done.

This short paper examines why children on the move need to be included in care reform in the region, how the care needs of these boys and girls can be met, and what lessons can be learned from the care of children on the move to inform the care of children more broadly.

This paper examines the nature and benefits of foster care and identifies some of the key challenges associated with this form of care in Eastern and Southern Africa. It outlines the elements of an enabling environment needed for successful large-scale foster care programmes, including legislation, guidance, changes to social norms, coordination mechanisms, and a strong social service workforce. The paper also provides lessons learnt from the region on how to support each stage of the foster care process.

The purpose of the Home Thrive Scale™ is to assess the possibility of a child staying with or returning to their family and to identify services needed to make reintegration possible.

Designed for trainers imparting life skills education to children ages 5-18.

This toolkit is designed for the social service workforce in need of basic counseling skills. It includes mini lessons that teach fundamental counseling skills and activities and worksheets to provide opportunity to practice the skills.

This toolkit is designed for parents/caregivers and the social service workforce guiding them. It provides practical tips that can be implemented quickly and mini lessons on topics of importance to anyone raising or supporting a child.

The toolkit provides the user with a comprehensive assessment framework for analyzing current systems, procedures, and practices against international standards and professional case management practices at both the case level and system level. This toolkit does not promote a specific model of case management since no one approach or model can be applied to every situation. Rather, it outlines the beneficial aspects, processes, and strategies of case management that have shown improved outcomes for children and families.

This section of the Community Planning Toolkit provides guidance on the issues to consider when planning and designing community engagement. It focuses on quality and effectiveness, process planning and designing engagement tailored to the particular issue, level of participation to be achieved, timeframe and range of stakeholders affected.

Vulnerable children and families need a strong social support network that acts as a safety net to effectively and sustainably respond to the situation of children and families at risk.

This toolkit explains the process behind asset mapping, looks at how to carry out a Community Street Audit, provides advice on making asset mapping meaningful and ensuring it leads to constructive action, and on involving different sections of the community - including community residents, elected councillors and representatives from local services. Finally it looks at the tools you may need, and how to keep community and local agencies informed of any action plans arising from the asset mapping.

Miracle Foundation's Child-Centered Case Management Toolkit provides hands-on training materials to help you get children safely and permanently into families. For an in-depth understanding of our case management tools and Thrive Scale™ contact safelyhome@miraclefoundation.org.

Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) Holistic Organizational Capacity Assessment Instrument (HOCAI) is designed to assist organizations to conduct a self analysis of their strengths and challenges, develop an action plan, and improve organizational functions through capacity strengthening. With HOCAI, CRS creates a standardized framework to help organizations engage in a process of continuous assessment and improvement that will sustain organizational capacities.

A critical step of the transition process is to put in place a written agreement that clearly outlines the commitments, expectations, and conditions of the partnership. A partnership agreement is typically signed after successful completion of the onboarding process. It formalizes the decision of key stakeholders to transition and should not be done before ample time and opportunity have been provided to secure buy-in.

Advancing Partners & Communities (APC) is a five-year cooperative agreement funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development beginning October 1, 2012. The project focuses on advancing and supporting community programs that seek to improve the overall health of communities and achieve other health-related impacts, especially in relationship to family planning. APC provides global leadership for community-based programming, executes and manages small- and medium-sized sub-awards, supports procurement reform by preparing awards for execution by USAID, and builds technical capacity of organizations to implement effective programs.

The purpose of these guidelines is to equip you with a tool that helps you build a sound understanding of an organisation so that you can make a well-informed decision about whether or not to establish a partnership with them. The check can also reveal to you other ways in which you can support the project achieve it’s goals – that may be helping them access additional training for the staff, sending your accountant to help them set up good cash management systems or providing the funding for them to hire an experienced staff member.

The Child Protection in Short-Term Missions Manual and Toolkit has been produced by ACC International Missions and Relief. It has been designed for those who are passionate about missions and engaging people in missions through short-term teams, who pursue excellence in all they do and who are committed to pursuing God’s heart for children and vulnerable members of society in the context of global missions.

This tool was designed to help those seeking to assist Christian faith-based actors involved in long-term residential care programs make the transition from institutional to non-institutional (family and community-based) child welfare programs. It was written to give some insight into what this journey called ‘deinstitutionalisation’ might look like and what steps and processes might be involved. Whilst it contains a brief overview of the technical stages, its main purpose is to guide you through the process of achieving buy-in and is not intended to be a technical deinstitutionalisation manual.

World Without Orphans Roadmap: Foundations for Active Engagement is a result of broadscale collaboration
among global, regional, and national leaders across many faith communities. It is informed by experts
from global organizations that lead the way in identifying best practices for caring for vulnerable families
and children.

A World Without Orphans original animation. Find out more at: www.worldwithoutorphans.org

This is a summary of three major new papers published in the Lancet with the support of Lumos which shed new light on the situation of children living in institutions globally and make important recommendations for donors, governments, civil society and individuals to help ensure every child can grow up in a safe, supportive and loving family and have the best chance in life.

According to UNICEF, nearly 90% of the world’s orphans have at least one living parent who cannot afford to safely care for them. The solution is family-based care.