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This issue brief from the UNHCR highlights key messages from UNHCR in regards to alternative care, including the importance of making alternative care arrangements based on the best interests of the child and using residential or institutional care only as a very last resort. The brief defines the role of the UNHCR in alternative care as well as key concepts of alternative care. The brief reviews the types of alternative care and key actions that UNHCR and its partners can do to ensure the best interests of the child in alternative care. The brief concludes with some examples of the…
On the 22nd October 2013, three Latin American presidents (Costa Rica, Honduras and Paraguay) gave their support to a new regional campaign in the Latin American and Caribbean region launched to end the placement of children under three years of age in institutions. This ‘Call to action’ is led by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the Latin American and Caribbean Chapter of the Global Movement for Children (MMI-CLAC), the Latin American Foster Care Network (RELAF), the …
This paper, a collaboration between EveryChild and HelpAge International, is the latest in EveryChild's Positive Care Choices series of papers on children's care options. The paper demonstrates how the vast majority of children outside of parental care are cared for by relatives, most commonly grandparents. The benefits of kinship care for children and carers alike are numerous, and many children express a strong preference to be cared for by grandparents if they cannot be cared for by their parents. Yet, support to kinship care is woefully inadequate, with most kinship carers…
20 years on from the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), evidence suggests an alarming lack of progress in achieving children’s fundamental rights to grow up in a loving family environment. Research, particularly from less developed regions, shows a substantial and growing number of children without parental care, with devastating impacts on children’s rights. In recognition of this problem, child rights activists have campaigned for the 20th anniversary to coincide with the agreement of UN guidelines aimed at preventing family separation, and ensuring…
The past six years have seen increasing engagement by the international community on HIV, AIDS and children. One of the eight Millennium Development Goals set by governments in 2000 relates directly to HIV and AIDS. In 2001, at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS, governments pledged to protect children affected by the disease. Global commitment to combat the impact of HIV and AIDS on children was again outlined in 2002 in ‘A World Fit for Children’, the outcome document of the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children. More recently, in June 2006, the UN…
One of the three new programme priorities of the Bernard van Leer Foundation is to help strengthen the care environment of the child. It does this through a stronger focus of its grantmaking on work that (1) supports parents and caregivers who are raising children in environments of stress, (2) helps parents and caregivers in their role of assuring children’s rights and development and (3) addresses the needs of children without parental care.
The importance of the family in a child’s life cannot be overstated as the article on “How poverty separates children and parents” (page 23)…