Child Welfare Reform in CEE/CIS Countries: Executive Summary

The assessment focuses on children without permanent parents who are in state care, which includes true orphans and social orphans. Traditionally in the region, such children were cared for by the state in several types of residential institutions. A major component of child welfare reform includes providing family-care alternatives, which may incorporate non-relative foster care, guardianship/kinship care, small group home care, reunification with biological parents, and adoption. The project was conducted in two sequential phases, Phase I and Phase II. The project emphasized three levels of analysis, which cut across both Phases. Phase I consisted of ranking countries in the region on the Marker of Child Welfare and providing year-to-year plots of the Marker between 1989 and 2005. These results showed that Russia, Belarus, and Moldova had the highest rates of children without permanent parental care in state services, followed by Romania and Kazakhstan. However, one result of the Phase I analysis was the conclusion that these plots are not readily interpretable without the Level 3 analysis, which was conducted in Phase II. Work on Level 2 analyses began in Phase I, which consisted of identifying several direct and indirect risk factors for why parents relinquished children to state care. These indicators, available in the TransMONEE database, fell into five hypothesized categories of plausible causes associated with the separation of children from their parents: financial inability of the family to care for the child, single mothers ill-equipped behaviorally and financially to care for a child, revocation of parental rights due to parental mental health, substance-abuse, or child abuse and neglect, children with disabilities, and problematic behavior of adolescents. Phase II of the research had two general purposes: analysis of risk-factor indicators and Level 3 analysis. The risk factors identified in the Level 2 analysis of Phase I were analyzed to determine if year-to-year changes in these risk factors coincided with year-to-year changes in the Marker of Child Welfare. The Level 3 analysis was refined in Phase II using in-country sources to interpret Level 1 and Level 2 data trends with the aid of qualitative information framed by the four pillars of policy, services, personnel preparation, and monitoring and evaluation. The results of these analyses are presented in the Addendum to this report, which also contains dossiers of year-to-year plots of indicators for each country. Collectively, these analyses produced several conclusions: inconsistency across countries, discontinuity in correspondence between year-to-year changes in the indicators and the Marker, and promising indicators such as the percentage of non-marital births, the percentage of children affected by parental divorce, and the percentage of low-birth weight births.