Strategic directions

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  Keeping families together

  We give children the chance to grow up in loving families and communities. We help strengthening families’ abilities to keep their children at home and offer them love, warmth and the best possible care and protection. We also support children and parents to reunite after a long period of separation.

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  Making baby homes history

  Institutional care is very detrimental for babies and young children’s wellbeing and development. We help babies who are abandoned or at risk to be abandoned by their parents to continue to live in safe and secure own or alternative families. We support and encourage communities, authorities and civil society organisations to strengthen the capacities of young parents, build up their parental skills and put in place effective early intervention services to support babies’ healthy development in a family environment.

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  Getting children into safe families

  There is widespread acknowledgement that for many children outside of parental care, family-based care offers a preferable alternative to residential care. However, in Moldova as in many other countries of the world, foster care, a potential key mechanism for providing such family-based care, remains under-resourced and rarely used. We support central and local authorities to help children who lost the care of their parents to find new caring and safe families.

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  Decreasing reliance on residential care

  Despite a substantial body of research highlighting the harm caused by residential care it remains to be a predominant care arrangement for children without parental care in Moldova. Although national gatekeeping legislation was passed in 2008, decision-making regarding the entry of individual children into residential care is often poorly managed, with limited assessment regarding the necessity of parental separation and the appropriateness of residential care.

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  Ensuring social inclusion of children

  Although inclusive education is prominently featured in the national Education Strategy of Moldova, educational systems continues to fail to meet the needs of all children in the country. Many children continue to be excluded from mainstream education due to poverty, ethnicity, disability, gender and other factors.

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  Building child participation

  Children are the experts of their lives. They now best what support should be developed and delivered to them and their families. Till now many professionals in Moldova are reluctant to listen to young people in care and don't see the need for it.  The more we start to build a movement for the children in care, the better in terms of reaching policy makers and pushing on for innovative policy and practice.

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  Protecting children from abuse and neglect

  Violence against children is never justifiable. Nor is it inevitable. If its underlying causes are identified and addressed, violence against children is entirely preventable. Violence against children occurs in all the environments where children are: in their family homes, schools and streets; in places of work and entertainment, and in care and detention facilities...