Consultancy - Child Protection Consultant to Develop Guidance Paper on Deinstitutionalization... Tender

Procurement Summary

Country : Switzerland

Summary : Consultancy - Child Protection Consultant to Develop Guidance Paper on Deinstitutionalization of Children with Disabilities in Europe and Central Asia

Deadline : 23 Aug 2018

Other Information

Notice Type : Tender

TOT Ref.No.: 25788338

Document Ref. No. :

Competition : ICB

Financier : United Nations Secretariat

Purchaser Ownership : -

Tender Value : Refer Document

Purchaser's Detail

Purchaser : UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN'S FUND
UNICEF 5 - 7 avenue de la Paix 1202 Geneva Tel: +41-9095111 Fax: +41-9095900/9095901
Switzerland
Email :genevaliaisonoffice@unicef.org/genevaask@unicef.org

Tender Details

Tenders are invited for Consultancy - Child Protection Consultant to Develop Guidance Paper on Deinstitutionalization of Children with Disabilities in Europe and Central Asia, Geneva, Switzerland.

UNICEF works in some of the world-s toughest places, to reach the world-s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child, Protection

Background

Institutional care is widely understood by governments and civil society to be harmful for children. The Convention of the Rights of the Child, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children all recognise that the ideal setting for a child to grow up in, and for persons with disabilities to fulfil their potential and participate as full citizens, is within a family environment that provides a nurturing and loving atmosphere, or, when necessary, within a community-based care system which is suitable to meet their individual needs. In addition to the human rights case, there is a strong economic case for choosing family- and community-based care over institutions. The cost of providing family- and community-based care is often less expensive and the social return is much higher.

After decades of evidence-based advocacy and policy dialogue, many governments have led reforms to close or transform large-scale institutions and replace them with community and family based alternative care services and put in place family support services to prevent children from being unnecessarily separated from their families. Throughout the countries in the Europe and Central Asia Region, significant progress has been made in terms of the development of new child and family services, although continued investment and momentum is required to ensure the reforms are irreversible and no child is left behind.

At the same time, the varying paces at which different services have been developed, and their uneven availability across time and space, have hindered the reforms and sometimes created unintended consequences. There is an increasing concern amongst child care professionals in some of the countries of the region that an emphasis on small group homes (SGHs) may contribute to the re-institutionalization or trans-institutionalization rather than re-integration and inclusion of children. Moreover, within a desired continuum of needed social services, the construction and running of SGHs may be burdensome on the child care budget, taking the lions' share of it and thus jeopardizing the development of community-based care and preventive services, the latter being the element of the reform which, across the entire region, appears still to be the least well developed. There is also recognition that small-scale, residential care, plays an important (albeit smaller) role in the child protection and child care system. And that in the context of dismantling large scale institutions, there may be a slightly larger role for SGHs in the medium term given the profiles of children who have spent years in harmful large institutional care and may be less inclined to move into family-based care. Furthermore, there are unresolved questions around when a small group home or small residential facility becomes too big, and therefore is no longer appropriate? There is guidance around the characteristics of a small group setting, but the specifics have not been agreed across organizations and stakeholders. This has led to variations in practice, and the possibility that governments and others are not being accurate in their classification of care placements. The continued uncertainty about what constitutes an appropriate small residential facility, and an inappropriate institution, also confuses the data and statistics around the number of children in institutional care in any given country or territory.

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