The EveryChild Coalition on Children Without Parental Care, and the Centre of Social Protection at the Institute of Development Studies are planning joint research on the links between social protection and children's care.

An estimated 24 million children across the world live without their parents, and numbers of children outside of parental care are growing. Poverty and deprivation have a major impact on children's ability to stay with their parents, and may also affect the ability of extended or other families to offer homes for children. Poverty also interacts with other determinants of children's care choices, such as HIV, migration and abuse or neglect in the home (EveryChild 2009a). As such, social protection may have an important role to play in preventing the loss of parental care and informing children's care choices.

In addition, social protection may prove important in reducing the extent to which children suffer from negative effects of the loss of parental care through its coverage of children outside of parental care and impact on quality of care that children receive. For example, social protection could reduce the hardships children commonly experience in extremely resource constrained grandparent headed households, and has the potential to mitigate stress cause by such hardships, improving relationships within the home (Hoffman et al 2008).

This research aims to explore the links between children's care and social protection through an examination of these issues.

We are currently seeking further funding for undertaking this piece of research.