This qualitative study examines how young care leavers in Ghana are involved in decisions about their transition from residential care, revealing that despite national and international policy commitments, their participatory rights are often neglected. Findings show that care leavers frequently feel excluded or manipulated in key decisions, highlighting the need for more inclusive, rights-based approaches that recognize them as active partners in planning their post-care futures.

The multiple and extensive transformations that have occurred in Eastern Europe since the 1990s did not bypass care, bringing diverse care regimes. This chapter, in the Research Handbook on Social Care Policy, aims to explore the main trends in the development of care policies in Croatia (a post-Yugoslav country) and the Czech Republic (a Visegrád country).

This policy paper examines Egypt’s protection framework for unaccompanied and separated migrant children, highlighting both significant recent advances, such as national SOPs, a new asylum law, and expanded residence permits, and persistent challenges related to legal visibility, registration delays, and service access. It proposes actionable reforms to strengthen legal, administrative, and service systems, including expanding family-based alternative care to migrant and refugee children, developing child-friendly asylum procedures, and better integrating NGO, refugee-led, and community-based support into state structures.

This article explores how infants’ rights in alternative care are understood and advocated for by practitioners in Finland, drawing on interviews with foster carers, social workers, and other professionals. The findings show that advocacy is driven by recognition of gaps in standardised practice and is enacted through embodied, institutional, and structural approaches, highlighting the need for age-aware expertise to fully recognise infants as rights holders in care.

This article examines how vulnerability is constructed and experienced within residential childcare institutions involved in humanitarian interventions in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with particular attention to adult narratives and Western positionality. Drawing on ethnographic research, it deconstructs structural and relational factors shaping children’s marginalisation and proposes methodological approaches that centre children’s perspectives in research.

This paper critically reviews India’s child welfare policies, highlighting how gaps in implementation, funding, and monitoring continue to leave millions of orphaned and abandoned children vulnerable despite existing legal frameworks. Drawing on international best practices, it proposes a shift toward family-based care, strengthened mental health and social work systems, technology-enabled monitoring, and greater child participation to build a more inclusive, child-centred welfare system.

This study examines the educational barriers faced by children in institutional care in India, identifying how structural rigidity, limited resources, stigma, and emotional neglect undermine equitable access to meaningful learning. Drawing on qualitative insights from care and education professionals, it highlights the critical role of social work in advancing child-centred, rights-based approaches to transform institutional care into an environment that supports inclusion, wellbeing, and educational equity.

This paper explores the lived experiences of Bhutanese unaccompanied and separated refugee children living in camps in eastern Nepal, examining how they navigate prolonged displacement, statelessness, and institutional neglect through ethnographic and narrative methods. It argues that these children exist in a “state-of-nowhere,” rendered politically and administratively invisible within refugee governance systems, and calls for rights-based, child-centred responses that address the structural and epistemic violence shaping their exclusion.

This qualitative study examines the lived experiences, motivations, and expectations of foster parents in Albania as the country transitions from institutional to family-based care, drawing on in-depth interviews with all active foster families at the time of the research. Findings reveal that fostering is driven by faith and compassion but shaped by limited state support, social stigma, and increasing awareness of children’s trauma, offering rare insight into how institutional and social contexts affect the sustainability of foster care in Albania.

This paper explores the mental health and wellbeing of care-experienced girls in Pakistan, highlighting how structural and systemic factors shape their experiences. Using focus group data, it identifies limited mental health awareness, gender discrimination and harassment, and restricted opportunities as key challenges, and offers recommendations framed within children’s and women’s rights to better support their futures.