CARE REFORM
in Child Frontiers

Our Care Reform Expertise

Over the last decade, Child Frontiers has led over 30 projects aimed at strengthening families and supporting appropriate alternative care. Our work has spanned the globe with contracts in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. We:

Carry out research, consultations and mappings on children’s care, ranging from small scale participatory child-led research to national surveys.
Assess and built the capacity of social workers and others who support children’s care.
Develop contextually specific policies, strategies and guidance on care with strong national ownership.
Enable the exchange of learning on care across using innovative tools.

Our Approach

Our work on care reform is guided by international standards, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children. We have a strong commitment to ensuring that all children can grow-up safe and protected in families, providing a range of family and community-based alternative care options, and reducing reliance on institutional care.

To achieve these goals, we must:

Develop context specific understanding and solutions. We will never import reforms from one context to another without adaptation, and always rely on those with local expertise as the core members of our teams.

Take a system strengthening approach, which examines and then builds each aspect of the care system.

Focus on understanding and addressing the often complex root causes of family separation. This includes examining the linkages between care and climate change and social protection.

Recognise and build on the central role played by families and communities, including supporting kinship carers and the extended family and community networks that parents and carers rely on.

Enable the participation of those with care experience in designing, delivering and assessing care reform processes.

Recognise how gender and discrimination, including discrimination against children with disabilities, affect children’s care and care reform efforts.

Our Care Reform Work

Our work ranges from short term projects examining an aspect of children’s care, to multi-year projects designed to transform the entire care system. We work at the international, regional, national and sub-national levels.

Some examples of our work on care reform:

Carrying out a landscape analysis of children’s care and exploring lessons learnt on care reform in three contexts for UNICEF Innocenti. This is to inform a global campaign on care reform led by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Establishing and managing UNICEF’s Regional learning platform on care reform in Eastern and Southern Africa.

Supporting Lebanon’s care reform process, from initial scoping and mapping to developing a new family-centred child welfare vision for the country.

Using peer-to-peer approaches to explore the lives of care leavers in Jordan, Thailand and Kenya, and assisting in the development of policies that reflect these realities.

Evaluating care reform programmes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Mapping and researching parenting support and behaviours in Tajikistan.

Researching kinship care across the world, and developing lessons learnt to guide better support for kinship care.

Why Work with Us

We provide teams that combine insights on care reform from across the world with sound local knowledge, including from those with direct care experience.

We have sound quality assurance and safeguarding mechanisms.

We provide teams that combine insights on care reform from across the world with sound local knowledge, including from those with direct care experience.

We constantly strive to deliver greater value for money and to consider sustainability in how we operate.

Meet our Care Reform Team

Our team is led by Emily Delap, our Care Reform Focal Point. Based in the UK, Emily has over 25 years experience working on child protection, with the last 15 years dedicated to care reform across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.