Improvement of Data on Children in Alternative Care
Advancing data on children in alternative care for improved policy development and monitoring
Accurate, complete and disaggregated information on children in different types of alternative care, their profile and where they go when they leave the alternative care system is essential for policymaking and for monitoring and evaluating the alternative care system. It is also essential to be able to budget and plan for the alternative care provisions needed and the scale on which they are needed.
The TransMonEE initiative in Europe and Central Asia has been spearheading the collection of data on alternative care, with the availability, disaggregation and quality of data continuously improving over the years. The TransMonEE Regional Database for Children includes quality stock and flow data from administrative sources on children in alternative care, covering 1989 to present, and serves as a regional good practice example for the production of a set of statistics based on agreed indicators, standard definitions and other harmonized metadata. Key results and lessons learned from several ground-breaking initiatives that were implemented over the past five years, as well as ongoing work of a regional network of national statistical offices on assessing and improving the availability, quality and comparability of data on children in alternative care, has paved the way for the development of an international statistical classification of alternative care for children.
Despite its importance and their own obligations, many countries still lack accurate statistics on the number and characteristics of children living in different types of alternative care settings. Official records in many countries, if they exist at all, tend to be incomplete, outdated and/or of varying reliability and quality. Therefore, there is an urgent need for countries to invest in efforts to strengthen administrative data systems for alternative care to produce policy-relevant, accurate, complete and disaggregated data on children living in such arrangements.
Strengthening official records will provide reliable sources of administrative data on children in alternative care for understanding the profile of the children placed in care, for monitoring their situation, for improved and targeted service delivery, for policymaking, planning and programming, and for strengthening governments' capacity to respond effectively to the specific needs of this subset of the child population. In the longer run, countries should also strengthen the interoperability and integration of their data systems with a view to improve data quality, increase operational efficiency, improve user experience, mitigate the risk of double counting, and reduce the monitoring and reporting burden. The imperative of focusing on the availability, comparability and quality of data on children in alternative care has also been one of the recommendations of the Guidance of the Conference of the European Statisticians on the improvement of statistics on children.
At the 2022 TransMonEE meeting in Ankara, UNICEF announced a new multi-year initiative in the Europe and Central Asia region aimed at strengthening the administrative data systems for alternative care and adoption in selected countries. Building on the work accomplished by UNICEF and its partners, this initiative strives to assist the interested countries to:
- Undertake a mapping of the existing national and sectoral administrative data systems for alternative care and adoption and to apply a global diagnostic toolkit to assess the effectiveness of the current administrative data system in order to identify where targeted investments are needed to improve performance and results.
- Develop a costed data action plan, informed by the results of the self-assessment, as a roadmap with concrete actions that need to be undertaken by the government and other stakeholders and partners, including UNICEF, to strengthen and improve the data systems.
Three countries (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan) joined the initiative in 2023 and conducted the assessment of alternative care data systems. Having applied context-specific approaches, countries are currently at different stages of validating the assessment findings and developing their national data improvement plans. The draft global toolkit developed by UNICEF to support countries in analysing the maturity of their administrative data systems on children in alternative care and in adoption, which was tested in 2023 as part of this initiative, will be finalised and made available for broader use this year.