Tool for Assessing and Monitoring National Alternative Care Systems

Author(s):

Year: 2019

Abstract:

Ensuring children grow up in protective family care, free from deprivation, exploitation, and danger is a priority for many countries. Significant improvements have been made in government systems and policies related to the well-being and development of vulnerable children, with particular attention to preserving and facilitating children's access to appropriate, protective, and permanent family care. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF), along with several other stakeholders, invest in strengthening government systems to ensure family-based care for children around the world. MEASURE Evaluation, with support from USAID/DCOF, developed this tool to support countries as they assess, address, and monitor national care system reform.

This tool applies the United Nations (UN) Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children. The structure of the tool follows a framework that covers key areas of caring for children outside of family care: foster care, residential care, supervised independent living, kinship care, other forms of informal care, adoption, and family reunification and system deinstitutionalization. This tool also has questions related to preventing unnecessary child-family separation, which is a critical component of keeping children in family-based care. The tool applies a system strengthening framework. We present system components that are commonly agreed upon to be critical to sustainably and effectively strengthening national systems.