Today about 6,000 boys and girls in Belarus live in residential institutions. Every day of childhood spent without mom's and dad's warm embrace, caring hands and loving eyes sets back the development of the child by one month.
Family for Every Child programme
- Helps children reconnect with biological parents or find a new family that can provide the needed warmth, love, care and a feeling of home.
- Develops alternative forms of placement for children deprived of parental care, such as adoption, custody and guardianship, foster families, family-type homes.
- Helps young people with disabilities to maintain independent living while supported by professional and volunteers.
Make a donation of any amount to help children get back to their biological family or find foster parents.
Since 2018, the programme has been implemented in the Gomel Region. According to its results:
- the number of children in the Gomel regional children's Home went down by 35%;
- the number of children who placed in residential care went down (out of 61 orphaned children and a child under 4 years old left without parental care, 41 (67%) are placed in foster families;
- the efficiency reaching out to biological families raising young children in difficult life situations was improved (out of 336 children under 4 years of age recognized as being in a socially dangerous situation, 31 babies (9%) were removed from the biological family.
Based on the experience of the "Family for every Child" programme in the Gomel region in 2021, agreements were reached with the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee on expanding the geography of the programme. UNICEF in Belarus, together with partners, will work on the prevention of institutionalization of children with disabilities and young children, paying special attention to strengthening the potential of the biological family, as well as the withdrawal from the boarding institution of children brought up in the following institutions: Vitebsk Regional Specialized Children's Home, Bogushevsky boarding school for disabled children with features of psychophysical development, Children's home of the city of Vitebsk, Begoml auxiliary boarding school of the Dokshitsky district.
