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The panellists presented different aspects of the child care reform taking place in the region with a view to exchanging experiences, identifying good practices and common challenges, as well as strategies to overcome them.Turkey highlighted the wide transformation of child services taking place in the country, shifting from institutional care to foster care and family-like care, but also through the provision of socio-economic support to vulnerable families to avoid family breakdown.
The ministerial conference ‘Ending the placement of children under three in institutions: Support nurturing families for all young children’, which took place in Sofia (Bulgaria) on 21 and 22 November 2012, helped to articulate a strong political commitment to continuing and accelerating work in the area of child care reform, especially towards:
• reducing the number of infants abandoned at birth
• reducing the number of children below three years old deprived of parental care and placed in institutional care
• increasing the number of children with disabilities maintained…
This report produced by the Center for Educational Research and Save the Children summarises a broader research study which examined the foster care pilot programme introduced in Armenia in 2005. The study aimed to find out if the pilot program succeeded, what problems arose, how the program could be improved and how foster care in Armenia could develop and expand effectively. Childcare and child protection in Armenia has undergone dramatic change since 1991 and is still in the process of development. While the legal bases for adoption, guardianship and…
Since 2005, the government of Georgia has made incredible progress in the area of child care reform. Guided by the National Child Action Plan (CAP) 2008-2011, the government of Georgia began the process of ending the use of large institutions in the country. A specific plan of action covering 2011-2012, was further developed and implemented. Gatekeeping policies were introduced nation-wide and a child care coordination council involving relevant line ministries, NGOs and key donors has been established to facilitate and monitor the process.
The key objectives of the child care reform were…
This recent study by UNICEF in Armenia costed different types of residential care and community based services in order to forecast the financial implication of the Government of Armenia’s reform policies which emphasize deinstitutionalization and transition to community based forms of care. The study shows that the reallocation of children into family care does not necessarily lead to the creation of an additional burden on the state budget. On the contrary, depending on the policy chosen, the savings can be quite tangible, even if the reform costs include the provision of jobs to excessive…
This manual offers a training session targeted at policy makers, professionals and paraprofessionals who are already working on programs to support children without appropriate care, or who may begin work in this area. It is designed as the first stage in a series of capacity building events which will support the development and implementation of improved care and protection systems for vulnerable children.
This workshop focuses on children in developing contexts, who require support within their families and those who need an alternative care placement. It does not address children on…
EveryChild is an international development charity working in 17 countries with a strategic focus on children without parental care. This document outlines EveryChild’s approach to the growing problem of children without parental care by defining key concepts, analysing the nature and extent of the problem, exploring factors which place children at risk of losing parental care, and examining the impact of a loss of parental care on children’s rights. It also provides principles for good practice in trying to reduce the number of children without parental…
Last year, UNICEF and the British non-governmental organization EveryChild set up a partnership to help the government find homes for what they call ‘social orphans’ – children living in orphanages who still have one or more parents.
UNICEF’s Representative in Georgia, Giovanna Barberis, says the organization has been pressing for institutional reform for many years and has made great headway at the policy level.
“We wanted to prove to the government that there were socially better environments for children, which were not more expensive than the institutional system,” says Ms. Barberis…
On 29 March 2006, the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev, signed the State Program on De-Institutionalisation and Alternative Care Services. This program comes at a time when Azerbaijan’s economy is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, and many other related reforms are under-way. There simply is no excuse today to keep children in institutionalized care when alternatives can be developed and families supported through improved wealth re-distribution systems.
The main goal of the Program is ‘to provide the formation and effective operation of the mechanisms of placing…
This UNICEF evaluation seeks to identify what specific contributions the “Prevention of Infant Abandonment and De-institutionalisation” (PIAD) and “Family Support and Foster Care” (FS&FC) projects are making towards the development of a full-fledged gatekeeping system in Georgia. In particular, the evaluation discusses: 1) whether the two projects have succeeded in establishing good practices in gatekeeping, which can have a demonstration effect and be scaled-up; and 2) whether they managed to influence government policies towards adopting a family and community-based approach to child…