A global influence

Coram International

Driving change

Work this year covered 48 countries including the situation and experiences of children affected by migration in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a regional evaluation of deinstitutionalisation and childcare reforms in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the drivers of child marriage in South Asia following the Covid-19 pandemic.

Reforming childcare systems

Over the last fifteen years, countries across Eastern Europe and Central Asia region have been reforming their childcare systems to ensure that all children grow up in a safe, family environment.

Institutionalisation of children, particularly children with disabilities, has long been recognised as a challenge in the region. Drivers of their institutionalisation include family poverty, stigma towards children with disabilities, lack of inclusive education and community-based services to prevent family separation, and the underdevelopment of family-based alternative care options such as foster care.

UNICEF Europe and Central Asia

Regional Office has engaged Coram International to take stock of the reforms since 2009 in seven countries (Armenia; Bulgaria; Georgia; Moldova; Montenegro; Serbia; and Tajikistan) to make recommendations to help ensure that the rights of children to live in a safe, family environment are put into practice.

Participatory research

Children’s voices remain central with participatory data collection methods helping to ensure that the views and experiences of children of all ages are heard in legal, policy and programming responses.

In Sierra Leone, as part of our research with UNICEF on the situation of children, our team utilised qualitative storytelling methods to understand children and young people’s attitudes and experiences of accessing services in the community.

Visual research methods such as drawing and emojis provide a way of understanding the experiences and views of children and young people involved in the childcare system, particularly children with disabilities, in Europe and Central Asia.

In India, Nepal and Bangladesh, acting and role play exercises as well as word association games enabled the exploration of children’s perceptions of marriage and to understand drivers within their communities and the impact of Covid-19 on child marriage.

A new youth advisory board comprised of children aged 10 to 18 from across the Philippines will advise and shape the consultative process for designing the national child protection strategy for the next ten years.

In the coming year

In the coming year, we will explore the development of The Commonwealth of Care, comparing how child welfare systems have advanced since 1948.

Protecting children

This includes working with stakeholders in Cambodia to develop its new Child Protection Law and developing a global guide on improving legislative frameworks to protect children from online sexual exploitation and abuse for UNICEF Headquarters in New York.