This week a major milestone was reached: ‘Alternative Care for Children Around the Globe’, the report giving an overview of the child protection and alternative care situation – and circumstances that impact it – for all autonomous countries in the world, was finally finished. It is now available to the public as a free download, which you can find HERE.
The report is the product of a research project that I started in the summer of 2015. Having worked in the field of alternative care – and particularly, but not exclusively, institutional care – in five different countries on three different continents, I felt that it would be very useful to me to have a better insight in the situation of institutionalised children in different countries and to what extent there were alternatives available to institutionalisation. And I felt that that kind of information might be useful to other organisations working in an international context as well.
As always I started out by trying to find a report of some sort that might give me an overview of this kind, just like I did in 2009 when I felt that there ought to be some kind of manual giving information about the minimum standards needed for adequate care in institutions. In 2009 I could not find such a manual, so I started writing it myself, and the one manual turned into a series of 4, the ‘Children Everywhere’ series.
Similarly, I was unable to find a global overview of any kind. I found various reports with very useful overviews by country of certain regions of the world, and some world overviews that disaggregated information by region, but none that gave a global overview with information by country. So, like with the manuals, I decided to make one myself.
Even I, when setting out on this journey, realised that this was a mad cap plan of enormous proportions. I knew it was going to take me years to attempt to gather as much information as I could find. I knew that for some countries, and on some subjects, it would be extremely hard to find information. However, I still felt it needed to be done. For my own benefit and hopefully also for that of other people.
And starting out on this research project, I did not have the luxury to dedicate myself full time to it. That is one of the reasons it took me so long. I worked on the research in between writing books, visiting projects and taking three months out of every year to work to earn the money I needed to stay alive and fund my projects. However, there was an advantage to the delay as well, a lot of very valuable reports that I have ended up using for this research, had not been written yet in the summer of 2015. And it seems to me it is particularly after that time that the movement towards family-based care has received a real boost, worldwide.
It has been a very challenging project, and I am the first to admit that there are serious limitations to the data that I have managed to gather. However, I do believe that the report has turned into something that has the potential to be of much use to many organisations. I am very happy that I have managed to bring it all together and make it available to the public.
That is the story of how I got started on the research project that brought us ‘Alternative Care for Children Around the World’. In the next blog I will tell a little bit more about how the work on the project went.
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