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This article examines how language, liminality, and social marginalization converge in the institutional lives of two displaced children in Angola. A displaced child is very likely to be placed into institutionalized care, which in Angola exists in the form of centros de acolhimento, residential centers that house minors affected by orphanhood, poverty, displacement, or abandonment.
Drawing on one year of ethnographic research in two residential centers, the article argues that despite being sites of care and protection, some children come to desire living on the street…
Abstract
Foster care is widely described as an effective approach for the relief and protection of children experiencing abuse and neglect in their homes. Less recognized is the particularly challenging experience of foster carers in “failed-state” settings and the resulting effects on foster children’s reintegration process. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, no public out-of-home care is established for vulnerable children. In July, 2017, “Foyer Ekabana”, launched a network of parents at parish level who willingly accepted to foster vulnerable children, named “Secours à l’…
Care arrangements—by parents, kin, or the state—are central to the well-being and mental health of children and youth (Coe 2012a). Over the past five years, the author of this paper has actively researched child fostering practices among transnational Cameroonian families. This study of distributed parenting and new ideas about what it means to raise a child properly is informed by over three decades of research among the Bamiléké. Originating in the mountainous Grassfields region straddling Cameroon’s Francophone/Anglophone divide, the author's research includes observations undertaken…
This chapter appears in Child Maltreatment in Residential Care: History, Research, and Current Practice, a volume of research examining the institutionalization of children, child abuse and neglect in residential care, and interventions preventing and responding to violence against children living in out-of-home care settings around the world.
Abstract
In Sub-…
Introduction
This desk review is part of a wider study commissioned to SOS Children’s Villages International by the European Commission. The overall study aims to map the issue of alternative care and deinstitutionalization in countries in Asia, South and Central America, and Africa. It also seeks to increase the evidence on child protection, alternative care and deinstitutionalization and on how this can be addressed, in order to potentially inform future initiatives in these continents, at country or regional level.
The study comprises three continental desk reviews…
This country care review includes the care-related Concluding Observations adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Committee's recommendations on the issues relevant to children's care are highlighted, as well as other care-related concluding observations, ratification dates, and links to the Universal Periodic Review and Hague Intercountry Adoption Country Profile.
According to this article from Forced Migration Review, when the majority of aid comes from external sources, it can cause those who receive the aid to feel powerless. External aid, along with the stress of protracted displacement can force changes in family structures and caregiving practices, thus threatening the family structure. In the most extreme cases, researchers found that parents may leave the family or a child, rationalising that the children would be better off without the parent or on their own.
This article focuses on the Gihembe camp in Rwanda, which…
The primary objective of this document is to provide a “linking and learning forum” for member organizations of the Parenting in Africa Network (PAN). The document, which highlights best practices in parenting and family strengthening interventions, is also intended as an advocacy tool to promote skillful parenting. The document evaluates several programs and interventions throughout Africa, most of which are implemented by PAN members and which are all aimed at strengthening families for the wellbeing of children. All of the programs surveyed regard parents and caregivers as significant…
Save the Children is undertaking innovative participative research in West and Central Africa on informal alternative care mechanisms,with a particular focus on kinship care. An estimated 15.8% of children under the age of 15 years in West and Central Africa do not live with their biological parents, the vast majority living in extended family care and only a negligible number lives in institutional care in that region. Evidence suggests that children are placed in kinship care for a variety of reasons, including traditional practices, poverty, increasing value for education and…
Children without appropriate care (CwAC) is a focus area for Save the Children’s child protection work for the period 2010-2015. The goal is that by 2015, 4.6 million children without appropriate care, and their families, including children affected by HIV and AIDS and those on the move, will benefit from good-quality interventions within an improved child protection system.
This report assesses the practice of kinship care within four research countries in the West and Central African region (Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Niger), reflecting upon the…