Resources Database

This paper aims to raise awareness on the perverse effects of institutionalization on children in the European context and calls for comprehensive system reforms, starting with a transition towards family and community-based care.

The Common European Guidelines on the Transition from Institutional to Community-based Care provide practical advice about how to make a sustained transition from institutional care to family-based and community-based alternatives for individuals currently living institutions and those living in the community, often without adequate support.  The Guidelines are aimed primarily at policy and decision makers in the European Union and the neighboring countries.

This handbook has been created to take us even further along the road to embedding children’s rights in alternative care provision. It aims to support implementation of the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children by making strong connections between national policy, direct practice and the Guidelines themselves. The handbook discusses setting standards for staffing formal care services and facilities.

This Program Review documents the evolution of the EvC Program since 1994, presenting the development of interventions to improve the lives of children through deinstitutionalization and identifying the best practices and lessons that may be relevant, useful and replicable to other initiatives and organizations around the world. It investigates and documents the programmatic approach to deinstitutionalization as a model of good practice.

The purpose of this document is to assist policy makers, practitioners and other concerned individuals to transform systems of institutional care into those based on family and community support. The guidance in this manual is based on current best practices in deinstitutionalizing children from residential care, identified from the experience of childcare professionals across the European region.

This report is about children in Eastern Europe and Central Asia who are deprived of parental care. Despite recent reforms, which have led to an increase in the number of children being placed in alternative families – for example with foster parents, guardians or adoptive parents – the majority of these children are still living in institutions. The report provides an in-depth review and analysis of the latest statistics provided by national statistical offices on children in formal care in these countries.

The report aims to promote accountability to children and compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The report takes stock of what governments have been doing for children over the last five years or so, and undertakes a systematic analysis of governments’ performances in realizing the rights and wellbeing of children over time and relative to one another.

This technical brief gives an overview of critical Early Childhood Development (ECD) elements and existing evidence for program managers who are interested in implementing ECD programs, or incorporating ECD elements within existing programs to support OVC.

The continued vulnerability of women and children demonstrates that moving away from vertical programs and towards MNCH and HIV integration with the incorporation of both health and social service programs is an important step to improve outcomes. This resource meets a need to compile evidence and information on MNCH and HIV integration and provides a step-by-step guide for policymakers and program planners interested in family centered, integrated services. This technical brief is intended to foster discussion about integration across the continuum of response.

This brief outlines essential care, support, and treatment services to best meet the multiple unique needs of ALHIV. This technical brief also offers promising approaches and outlines a model of adolescent transition of HIV care and social support services. Highlighting key principles and recommendations, this brief offers guidance to coun­tries and programs on how to provide the multidis­ciplinary care, support, and treatment services these adolescents need and deserve.

In order to develop the evidence base and advocate for the strengthening of national child protection systems, governments and their partners require accurate, regular and up-to-date data and information on how such systems are functioning. This publication proposes a framework of core indicators for measuring and monitoring national child protection systems in the East Asia and Pacific region. The indicators, used either in concert or selectively, will support monitoring and assessment of the enabling environment or ‘governance’ of national child protection systems.

This Handbook is a response to the need to have a comprehensive, standardized and user-friendly reference on health workforce monitoring and evaluation as a means to develop in-country capacity to build the knowledge base needed to guide, accelerate and improve country action.

Using social justice as the conceptual foundation, the authors present the structural barriers to socially just intercountry adoptions (ICAs) that can exploit and oppress vulnerable children and families participating in ICAs. They argue that such practices threaten the integrity of social work practice in that arena and the survival of ICA as a placement option.

This report presents a synthesis of the results of a four-country research project undertaken in Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa and Zambia on the development of community and home-based care (CHBC) in the context of HIV. The research was commissioned by the Caregivers Acton Network (CAN) in 2011 to inform its advocacy agenda with regard to highlighting the importance of community care and support programs. 

This document highlights an MSH Success Story and describes Phelisanang Bophelong, a program that provides services, including food security, health care referrals, economic strengthening, and psychosocial and spiritual support to orphans and vulnerable children and their caregivers in Thaba Tseka district of Lesotho. This program falls under the Building Local Capacity for the Delivery of HIV Services in Southern Africa Project in Lesotho, funded by USAID.

Retrak has developed its Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which provide practical guidance on implementing the Retrak model of successfully returning street children to safe homes in families and communities, where each child feels a sense of belonging through a secure attachment to caring adults. SOPs aim to provide a simple reference document containing detailed, step-by-step explanations on how to undertake a program in order to ensure a quality of care for the children and family involved.

The Referral Systems Assessment and Monitoring (RSAM) Toolkit was developed to assist health and program managers in obtaining and using information regarding the performance of referral systems. These systems play an increasingly important role in the health systems of developing countries as result of the recent impetus toward service integration.

This brief updates the 2008 version of “Pathways to Change.” It maintains most of the content from the original piece and provides information on four additional theories. It continues to focus on theories most directly applicable to either understanding how policy change happens or how specific advocacy tactics play out. Additionally, this update includes an expanded section on how evaluators, advocates, and funders can apply these theories to advocacy and policy work. While the theories included may have broad applicability, the brief is grounded in the context of US domestic policy.

The guide is written for child and youth care workers (CYCWs) and it focuses on the parts of the South Africa Children’s Act that are most relevant to them. This is an updated edition of the guide which contains extra information for professionals who provide services to children living and working or begging on the streets. It also has updated information on developments in the law and in government policy. This guide is not meant to replace the Children’s Act. Instead, it should be read together with a copy of the Act itself.

This publication presents the findings of a study undertaken as part of a three-year project on the ‘Promotion of Professional Social Work towards Social Development and Poverty Reduction in East Africa’ (PROSOWO), under the auspices of the Austrian Partnership Programme in Higher Education and Research for Development (APPEAR).