Over 1.5 years, more than 650 young children avoided orphanages thanks to foster care services

Since the beginning of 2024, foster care services for children have been actively developing in Ukraine. Currently, 518 foster families are working in communities. They are temporarily caring for 1,019 children whose parents cannot provide care for various reasons. Foster care is an alternative to institutional care that serves the best interests of the child. The child stays with a caring family while their parents resolve their problems or until a new permanent family is found for them.

Between January 2024 and early June of this year, 2,228 children were or continue to be in foster care. Of these, 658 are children from birth to four years old who avoided orphanages thanks to foster care.

"The lack of a stable family environment has negative consequences for every child. For young children, these consequences can be catastrophic. That's why the state is working to develop a system of care and support for children and families that ensures children's right to grow up in a safe and caring family environment. Having enough foster families is one of the key factors in ensuring this right. Therefore, I call on communities to actively implement this service," said Oksana Zholnovych, Minister of Social Policy.

Every year, about 7,000 children need temporary alternative care. Over the past year and a half, the number of foster families has increased sharply: from about 300 to more than 500. This was facilitated by changes in the working conditions for foster parents introduced by the Ministry of Social Policy and the "Family for Every Child: Development of Foster Care" project, which is being implemented directly in communities. However, even this number of families is still not enough to fully meet the needs of children.

The leaders in the share of communities that have implemented foster care services are Kharkiv Oblast (48% of communities in the region), Cherkasy Oblast (39%), and Kirovohrad Oblast (37%). The smallest number of communities currently covered by foster care are in Volyn (7%) and Zakarpattia (6%).

An example of a region actively developing foster care services with many newly established families is Khmelnytskyi Oblast. At the beginning of 2024, there were only two foster families in the region. Now there are thirty.

Statistics prove that foster families truly save children from institutional care: over the past year and a half, 43% of children returned to their biological families after foster care, and 44% were placed in family-based care. Therefore, the Ministry of Social Policy calls on communities to work on developing foster care services, as this is one of the key components of ensuring every child's right to grow up in a family environment in Ukraine.