Foster care around the world - IFCO - International Foster Care Organisation

Estimating the number of children in alternative care across the world

Introduction
This is a summary of a paper by Nicole Petrowski, Claudia Cappa & Peter Gross (2017), current and former specialists from UNICEF. Further details of the article may be found here.

In their paper the authors estimate the number of children living in residential and foster care across the world, covering 142 countries, and more than 80% of the world’s population of children. The task of compiling data is hindered by a lack of functioning systems for gathering information on children in alternative care in many countries in the world.

The authors of the article provide a context for the information they have collated, but for the purposes of this summary the focus is on the numerical data in order to give the reader a snapshot of the estimated number of children in alternative care between 2012 and 2017, the period during which the information was gathered, although some of the data went back to 2006. The estimates provided are global and regional and not by country. The regions used by UNICEF are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: UNICEF Regions

Regions	Abbreviations
Eastern and Southern Africa	ESAR
West and Central Africa	WCAR
Middle East and North Africa	MENA
South Asia	South Asia
East Asia and Pacific	EAPR
Latin America and the Caribbean	LACR
Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States	CEE/CIS
Industrialised countries	Industrialised countries

The data
Of the 142 countries for which information was available, 86 countries had data on both residential and foster care, while 56 countries had data on either residential or foster care but not both. The most common source of data was administrative records of government ministries. It is worth noting that there were disparities between the years in which the data was collected. It was also more difficult across all regions to obtain reliable data on foster care than it was on residential care.
The tables below give a breakdown of the number of children in residential care and foster care. In total there were an estimated 2,726,000 children in residential care, an average of 120 children per 100,000 of 84% of the world’s child population. Due to a lack of data it is not possible to estimate the total number of children in foster care.

Table 2: Number of countries with residential care data

Regions	Number of countries in the region	Number of countries with residential care data
CEE/CIS	21	21
South Asia	8	8
LACR	33	31
Industrialised countries	39	28
EAPR	29	10
MENA	20	14
ESAR	23	14
WCAR	24	14
World	197	140

Table 3: Number of countries with foster care data

Regions	Number of countries in the region	Number of countries with foster care data
CEE/CIS	21	17
South Asia	8	1
LACR	33	20
Industrialised countries	39	28
EAPR	29	2
MENA	20	8
ESAR	23	5
WCAR	24	7
World	197	88

Table 4: Number of children in residential care

Regions	Number of children in residential care	Number of children in residential care per 100,000
CEE/CIS	664,000	666
South Asia	93,000	15
LACR	189,000	99
Industrialised countries	384,000	192
EAPR	772,000	153
MENA	212,000	126
ESAR	286,000	120
WCAR	126,000	51
World	2,726,000	120

[Population of children covered is 84%]

Table 5: Number of children in foster care

Regions	Number of children in foster care	Number of children in foster care per 100,000
CEE/CIS	788,000	790
South Asia	n/a	n/a
LACR	54,000	n/a
Industrialised countries	799,000	399
EAPR	n/a	n/a
MENA	52,000	31
ESAR	n/a	n/a
WCAR	n/a	n/a

[Not enough data available to calculate estimates in five regions]

Nicole Petrowski, Claudia Cappa & Peter Gross (2017) ‘Estimating the number of children in formal alternative care: challenges and results’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 70: 388-398.