Global Report on Children's Care and Protection 2024

Everywhere, children experience separation from their families. Often, it can be prevented.

The separation violates every child’s right to be cared for in a family environment. It carries detrimental long-term consequences on the child’s development and well-being. Despite efforts to develop national child and social protection systems including measures to support families, family separation keeps affecting millions of children worldwide.

SOS Children's Villages and partners from 10 academic institutions from around the world have researched the phenomenon of child-family separation and what can be done to prevent it. The research tries to fill a global gap of information regarding middle and low-income countries, the contexts of which are not well understood.

The research adopts a child-centred approach to value the lived experiences and voices of the children and families impacted by separation that are largely missing in current studies.

The research explores:

The drivers of child-family separation 
The situation of children affected by it
Gaps in multi-sectoral and multi-level responses to prevent and address child-family separation

Learn more about our events

Here you can find detailed information on the Online Launch of the Global Report on Children's Care and Protection 2024 and the experts' bios.

The information on the Launch at the United Nations is available here.

The launch of the report is followed by the online conference 'Strengthening Families, Protecting Children' on 30 and 31 October. It will explore the topic of child-family separation in greater depth. Over two half-days, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers will discuss strategies and next steps to better support children and families featuring promising practices from Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Learn more here.

When and for what purpose will the findings be released?

The research report and findings will be published on 29 October, the International Day of Care and Support.

The findings are intended to inform the development of effective universal and specialist programmes and services to address the underlying causes of child-family separation.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Our conceptual framework takes a holistic approach to understanding and assessing the drivers of child-family separation. Grounded in a socio-ecological model, we gauge the perspectives of multiple actors including children, young people, family members and professionals, and analyze how these relate to contexts around them.

The research employs a mixed-methods methodology, combining the analysis of existing research and data, as well as the collection of new qualitative data. This helps us understand the current state of knowledge on the topic and builds on that with the perspectives and experiences of children, young people, family members and professionals and their proposed strategies for change.

Research components

The research components include:

A global systematic literature review on the drivers of child-family separation (Population Studies and Training Centre, Brown University)

8 country case studies, in high, low and middle-income contexts: Denmark, El Salvador, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, and Uruguay. This involved participatory research with children, young people, family members and consultations with stakeholders from multiple sectors, including child protection and social protection (Child Consulting Ltd and local partner universities)

Complementary follow-on research including:

A global desk review and four country case studies in El Salvador, Denmark, Kenya and Lebanon on decision-making of the social workforce in state gatekeeping systems  (Child Consulting Ltd and local partner universities)

Rapid evidence reviews looking at further aspects of the research questions

For more information, please contact evidence-and-learning@sos-kd.org