The job that remains: an overview of USAID child welfare reform efforts in Europe and Eurasia

While important steps have been made to shift child protection from institutional care to community-based services, the reforms in Eurasia region are fragile and the sustainability of investment to date is questionable. This report examines the child welfare progress of eight countries in Eurasia where the American agency USAID has funded reforming activities in this area. The study aims at describing the key lessons learned and best practices that have emerged from USAID-funded child welfare programs in the region. The report covers: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.

The authors underline that all countries in the region have ratified the UN Convention on the rights of the child and most of them passed modern legislation to reform child welfare systems. Consequently, many lessons were gleaned, such as:

• government and donors must work together for reform, for if they do not share a common vision, their interventions may conflict
• reform is best begun at the local government level with systemic change growing in a “bottom up” direction; a community-based approach is the best way to introduce innovations and changes
• all critical elements of the system—policy, alternative services, human capacity, and standards and performance monitoring—must be developed simultaneously
• the humanitarian attempt to improve the conditions in institutions can have unintended consequences
• similarly, a hasty large-scale deinstitutionalisation effort before a prevention system and human capacity are in place may lead to a negative situation for children
• a critical mass of reformed services is necessary to ensure sustainability of countrywide reform
  

The document suggests that costs to complete reforms are small compared to the costs of failed reforms. Nevertheless, it should be understood that any strategic plan to reform a child welfare system needs to include an assessment of budgetary allocations and incentives.