This report is based on 11 weeks of field research in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau between November 2009 and February 2010.

In March 2013, a fire erupted in the Dakar neighborhood of Medina and a Quranic boarding school, housed in a makeshift shack caught on fire. Eight young boys at the school were burned to death, but the guardian was absent because the house was unsanitary and uninhabitable.

While many migrants and asylum-seeking children may try to reach Australia, they often spend months or years caught in Indonesia.

The Canary Islands were in the spotlight of international media attention in 2006 when more than 30,000 migrants arrived in rickety boats from West Africa. Among them were 928 children who arrived without a parent or care-giver.

This report is based on interviews with more than fifty street children in the Democratic Republic of Congo––children who might not necessarily be without families, but who live without meaningful protection, supervision, or direction from responsible adults.

This study used a secondary analysis of data from 2003 to 2013 to better understand the situation of children temporarily abandoned in Romania. It looked at data for children aged 0-3 years who were abandoned in different hospital units or institutionalized in public orphanages or public and private foster care institutions. 

Children who have experienced early adversity have been known to be at risk of developing cognitive, attachment, and mental health problems; therefore, it is crucial that children entering foster care can be properly assessed as early as possible.

The negative impact of childhood maltreatment, which can often extend well into adulthood, consistently appears to be ameliorated if victimized children possess several resiliencies or strengths.

The present study aimed to identify the proportion of children who are orphans and their geographic distribution in Nepal.

Eurochild contributed to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' report “Towards a better investment in the rights of the child” with a joint submission with Hope & Homes for Children and SOS Children’s Villages International.

This TedX presentation features Greta Munns, a youth empowerment advocate who was placed in foster care at age fifteen. Her “story” is what prompted her exploration of the foster care system.

This manual, produced by Save the Children in Sri Lanka, provides guidance on Family Group Conferencing (FGC), which was introduced to the governmental childcare structure in Sri Lanka's Southern Providnce between 2006-2008. The key objectives of this training manual are to pr

This is a retrospective exploratory study looking at 73 family group decision-making conferences for chidlren referred to institutional public services in Kenya. The purpose was to explore the conference outcomes on the child's safety, permanency and wellbeing.

This project aimed to bring together the available information on the number of disabled people living in residential institutions in 28 European countries, and to identify successful strategies for replacing institutions with community-based services, paying particular attention to economic issues in the transition. It is the largest study of its kind. This project was funded in order to identify as a priority the practical considerations of how to support states making the transition to community-based services, including managing the costs of doing so. 

Despite Hungary signing on to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), there has been no significant change in the number of people with disabilities in Hungary who are placed in institutions. Mass institutionalisation continues to be the predominant form of care for people--including many children--with mental health issues and intellectual disabilities. 

The Deinstitutionalization Toolkit is designed to provide all those interested in institutional closures and expanded community living opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities and developmental disabilities (ID/DD) with information, strategies, state data, and case studies that can facilitate closure and build community capacity to serve more people with ID/DD in the community. It covers topics such as building a broad-based coalition, understanding and working within the political environment, creating a community system of care, and relevant laws, policies, and court decisions.

This report documents Ukraine’s Soviet-era system of orphanages and other institutions for children with disabilities. The report details the violence, exploitation, and other human rights violations that are frequently committed against these children. It also shows how families who wish to keep their children with disabilities at home are often forced to institutionalize them as a result of lack of support. 

This document reports on an Institutional Learning Process that has critically analysed the impact and effectiveness of Terre des hommes’ (Tdh) engagement in Albania over the last 14 years. It looks at the role Tdh has played in the emergence of a State Child Protection System (CPS) in Albania. 

The purpose of the toolkit is to assist all public authorities in Europe involved in the programming and implementation of EU Structural Funds (and other relevant funds) to make decisions which will help to improve the lives of more than a million European citizens currently living in institutional care. The toolkit aims to explain how EU funds can support national, regional and local authorities in designing and implementing structural reforms to develop quality family-based and community-based alternatives. The toolkit explicitly deals with the European Social Fund (ESF) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), but it aims to apply also to the programming and implementation of the European Agricultural and Rural Development Fund (EARDF) and the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA). 

This report was written by Keetie Roelen and Helen Karki Chettri from the Centre for Social Protection (CSP) at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), with inputs and support from Family for Every Child and Challenging Heights, Ghana. The report investigates the links between child wellbeing, children’s care, family cohesion and the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme (LEAP), a national social protection scheme in Ghana which aims to reduce extreme poverty in the country and is centred on providing cash transfers to the most vulnerable.

This fact sheet summarizes a qualitative research study conducted by the National Adoption Coalition South Africa (NACSA) that explored child abandonment and adoption in the context of African ancestral beliefs in urban South Africa. The goal of this one-year study was to better understand the growing practice of child abandonment and declining adoption rates in South Africa.

The United Nations, Department for Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Social Policy and Development released the Final Report of the Expert Group Meeting (EGM) on "Family Policy Development: Achievements and Challenges” which was produced after the 14-15 May 2015 EGM. The meeting focused on changing families, family law reforms, violence in the family and their impact on family policy development.

A press release from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India recapped a series of new initiatives by the Ministry during 2015. The achievements relevant to children’s care are briefly described below and include the launch of the flagship programme Beti Bachao Beto Padhao for protection of the girl child; several initiatives to track, restore, and rehabilitate missing children; and adoption reforms and a new foster care system.

In this TED talk, pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains how childhood trauma--such as abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse--has real, tangible effects on the development of the child's brain. Children who have experienced high levels of trauma and adverse childhood experiences are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. This is because of the body's stress response system, which is activated repeatedly during childhood by the adversity. 

This study carried out in the United States used a lens of family stress theory to explore adoptive parents’ responses to unexpected characteristics of their children. 

On July 27–29, 2015, the Forum on Investing in Young Children Globally, in partnership with the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, held a workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to examine topics related to supporting family and community investments in young children globally. 

This handbook authored by the World Health Organization Europe and Liverpool John Moores University – based on a series of interviews with the world's leading experts on preventing child maltreatment – provides practical information to policy-makers, practitioners and others on implementing prevention programmes. The handbook describes key principles for selecting and delivering programmes, and important practical considerations, including resources and technical support. 

Retrak has released a literature review on independent living programmes in an effort to understand the needs of young people coming of age on the streets.

To better understand the impact of donor funding, Lumos is conducting a five-part research study to examine the role of donors across a variety of sectors in propagating, supporting or ending the institutionalization of children. This report on US government funding is the first in the series. 

In this article, a Human Rights Watch researcher describes her personal experiences meeting adults and children in the Western Balkans who have spent their lives hidden away in institutions because they have a disability.