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Child rights must be at the centre of all adoptions in Nepal, says this major study on adoption released in Kathmandu by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Terre des hommes (Tdh). The main conclusion of the 60-page report, ‘Adopting the rights of the child: a study on intercountry adoption and its influence on child protection in Nepal’, is that intercountry adoption should not be allowed to resume without appropriate safeguards being put in place at all levels. Only four out of every 100 children adopted in Nepal are adopted by a Nepali family and many children put…
The purpose of this report is to create a strategy for assessing the status and progress of child welfare reform in CEE/CIS countries using the best available quantitative and qualitative information. The assessment focuses on children without permanent parents who are in state care, which includes true orphans and social orphans. Traditionally in the region, such children were cared for by the state in several types of residential institutions. A major component of child welfare reform, however, includes providing family-care alternatives, which may incorporate non-relative foster care,…
Cambodia counts an estimated 670,000 orphans. Many of these children do not have primary caregivers and are in need of alternative care. They are abandoned, live and/or work in the streets, are affected by HIV/AIDS, are victims of exploitation or trafficking, detained in prison; hence in need of special protection. In Cambodia, children without primary caregivers were traditionally placed in the care of relatives, neighbors or in pagodas and presently, an estimated 11,400 children live in institutional residential care facilities throughout the country.
Inter-country adoption of Cambodian…
There are an estimated 7000 childcare institutions across Indonesia caring for up to half a million children. The Indonesian government itself owns and runs only a handful of those institutions, less than 40. The vast majority of these institutions were set up privately, particularly by faith based organisations. While many receive some financial support from the government, most do not come under any type of supervision or monitoring. In fact, the government does not have any data about institutions that do not receive its financial subsidy and it only has very limited data on those that do…
It is estimated that 70,000 children below the age of 15 are infected with HIV in India and 21,000 children are infected every year through mother to child transmission. Nearly half of reported AIDS cases are in the 15–29 age group. Yet, India has a unique opportunity to use her strengths – low prevalence, concentrated epidemic, rapidly increasing ART coverage, strong government structures and family safety nets, growing recognition and advocacy for human rights and a robust media – to free the next generation from the burden of AIDS.
The Government of India is committed to preventing HIV-…
This report, prepared for the Social Transition Team of the USAID Bureau for Europe and Eurasia (E&E), is the result of a study of promising practices in community-based care for vulnerable groups conducted in five countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Romania, and Russia) in the E&E Region between September 2004 and March 2005. Of particular interest is how these countries are moving from residential care to family-focused, community care models utilizing internationally recognized standards for children and youth, elderly, disabled, and minority groups (with an emphasis on Roma…
Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality and achieving all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) related to health and education are largely dependent on progress in nutrition. If undernutrition is not successfully addressed, it will be difficult to reach the other MDGs. Every year, it is estimated that undernutrition contributes to the deaths of about 5.6 million children under the age of fi ve. One out of every four children under five – or 146 million children in the developing world – is underweight for his or her age, and at increased risk of an early death.…
Recent consultations undertaken by the ILO in Kenya, the Philippines and Guatemala have confirmed that there is little awareness about child labour issues among indigenous peoples; that previous child labour studies and research largely ignore indigenous communities; and that few programmes and projects address indigenous child labour.
It has, however, also become increasingly clear that indigenous children are disproportionately affected by the worst forms of child labour. Specific approaches are needed to effectively combat child labour among indigenous peoples.
The following…
Several developing economies have recently introduced conditional cash transfer programs, which provide money to poor families contingent on certain behavior, usually investments in human capital, such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centers. Evaluation results for programs launched in Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Turkey reveal successes in addressing many of the failures in delivering social assistance, such as weak poverty targeting, disincentive effects, and limited welfare impacts. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including the…
In large-scale emergencies, food aid is often one of the biggest and longest-running responses. Oxfam is concerned about the standardisation of such food-aid responses and its appropriateness in the current post-tsunami context. Where food is available, and markets functioning, cash is an appropriate alternative to food aid.
Oxfam is publishing this briefing note because it is concerned about challenging the bias towards food aid in the current design of relief responses, and to raise awareness and expertise among relief workers on cash-transfer programmes and local food purchase.…