A week ago the report ‘Alternative Care for Children Around the Globe’ was made available to the public (it can be downloaded HERE). In the previous blog, I wrote about how I ended up starting this enormous project in the summer of 2015. This week I would like to dive into another question that I get asked quite a lot with regards to the report: How did you find all of that information?
As I mentioned in the previous blog, I was aware of the gargantuan proportions of the undertaking that I was embarking on when I first decided to start work on what at the time I called ‘the world list’. When I start something – not a rare occurrence – that is so big it causes most people to freeze as they contemplate ‘where on earth do you even start’, I always just grab the first thread or corner and start pulling or nibbling away at that, simply to get going. And then I’ll see where that lands me and what gaps are left to fill when the first start has been made.
As a start I formulated 10 questions or areas of interest (which are described in the Methodology of the report) about which I wanted to gather information for all countries. Then I sent emails to a number of large international organisations that are involved in child protection and aid to vulnerable children, asking whether they had research or reports that could help me answer those questions. Some of them got back to me and thus I started by making my way through the publications brought out by UNICEF, published on the Better Care Network and a few other sources like that.
This was an easy and very satisfying start. Since you start out with nothing, initially every day brought new information and allowed me to put data in blank spaces. I found it very interesting to note that the big research papers from the large organisations provided a lot of information about a number of countries. Quite early on in the project I had at least some information on each of the 10 areas for about 10-20 countries, while there was still nothing at all for many, many other countries. And there was not clear logic -as far as I could make out – as to why these countries and not others.
Something I also found striking was that while I had expected statistical information to be missing from UNICEF’s annual overviews for low income countries that do not have strong monitoring systems, I was amazed to find that actually there was a lot more statistical data missing from the overviews for high income countries. The latter very definitely have those statistics available, so why will they not make them public or let them be used in a UNICEF global overview?
When I had made my way through the ‘libraries’ of major organisations that do research in the relevant areas, I started doing google searches for the individual topics and/or for individual countries. This was of course a lot slower going than the reports providing a comparison between the situations of 15 different countries. But it still got me a lot of information. In the meantime, I also kept an eye on newspapers and other media and gathered websites and newspaper articles that provided useful information. I also used contacts I have with people from a number of different countries, to ask for help gathering information about their particular countries. And in a few cases people have really come through for me and provided me with information and statistics that I would not have been able to access as a member of the public.
Then, at a point when I had gathered quite a lot of information about quite a lot of countries, but was still missing key elements for certain countries and most information for several other countries, I was starting to wonder whether I could ever manage to find a way to fill in the remaining gaps. Around that time, through a coincidence, by following another trail of links within articles etc. I stumbled upon the online goldmine of the reports that all countries that have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (all countries apart from Somalia) are obliged to send to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, under article 44 of the Convention. This really helped me to fill in a lot of the gaps. Without it, the report as it exists today, would not have been possible.
That is essentially how the information was gathered. And I will be the first to say that although I found a lot of information, there are serious limitations to the data. For one, while I tried to find recent information for all countries, for some I was unable to find anything after 2002, which is very old, considering the enormous changes and progress towards family-based care that can be seen in most countries over the past decade. Still, even with the limitations, I believe the report to be a valuable tool for anyone working with vulnerable children in an international context.
In the next blog I will write about how working on this research project changed my life and work.
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