5th - 11th of October 2026
Join the campaign and help us deepen global understanding of kinship care
What policies and practices exist around the globe that create the conditions for kinship care to thrive? What is and isn’t working?
Around the world, children who cannot be cared for by their parents are often raised by grandparents, relatives or family friends. This is known as kinship care. Kinship care keeps families together and strengthens communities. Yet, despite being the most widely used form of alternative care worldwide, it remains under-recognised and poorly supported in many countries.
This Global Kinship Care Week, we are bringing together organisations across the world to explore what policies can do to better support kinship care, and to call for change where gaps remain. Based on our recent Kinship Care Policy Mapping, co-led by 21 civil society organisations across 20 countries, we are sharing stories, evidence and insights from our global, national and local contexts.
Learn more, get involved: download the campaign pack below
What is Kinship Care?
Kinship Care happens around the globe. Watch our campaign video to see why it is important, and why it matter.
Why does this matter?
When children cannot remain in the care of their parents, every effort should be made to support safe kinship care arrangements. A child’s right to be with their family, in its diverse forms, should be prioritised wherever this is safe and in their best interests. However, in many countries, kinship carers do not have access to the recognition, services, financial assistance or legal support they need. This means children and carers can become invisible within national systems. Global Kinship Care Week sets out to change that.
Why are we running this campaign?
Together with our members, we have been advocating for kinship care, and researching how it can be better supported, over recent years. Our collective work has been fuelling global conversations and been connected through our members’ local leadership. Read more below.
Download the Rise Up Policy Brief
Download the Kinship Care Policy Brief, created in collaboration with ISPCAN (International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect) and Lumos
Find out what's happening, read our blogs
Blog #1
We surveyed kinship care policy across 21 countries and this is what we found.
Blog 2
Find out what’s happening in your country, and what our members are doing
Over the past year, Family for Every Child and our members have been asking: what policies create the conditions for kinship care to thrive? Together, we mapped them out across 21 countries. This mapping is summed up in “The Rise Up Policy Brief”, which is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese below.
These are our five key recommendations, based on the Global Guidance on Kinship Care, and the Global Policy Mapping:
1. Define kinship care in law
76% of countries formally recognise kinship care in law. Only 48% recognise customary or traditional forms, and 62% distinguish non-relative carers.
2. Prioritisation in law
81% have a kin-first policy in principle. But only 38% specifically address disadvantaged children within kinship care policy.
3. Support for kinship carers
Kinship carers receive far less support than other caregivers. Averaged across 7 support types, informal kinship carers receive support in just 28% of countries, versus 60% for biological parents and 56% for foster parents.
4. Registration & social services
95% require formal legal status for decision-making authority. 62%+ of countries have no dedicated mechanism to monitor informal kinship arrangements.
5. Count kinship care in data
95% require formal legal status for decision-making authority. 62%+ of countries have no dedicated mechanism to monitor informal kinship arrangements.
What does good look like? One country per finding: examples of good policy and practice
Rwanda | Recognition in law
Rwanda formally recognises kinship care in national law, including customary and traditional arrangements.
The law distinguishes kinship carers who are relatives from those who are non-relatives (particularly within formal foster care) and prioritises both categories over institutional/residential care. This sits within Rwanda’s broader child protection architecture: the Tubarerere Mu Muryango (TMM) programme integrates kinship care into community-level family-strengthening work, and kinship care is named as the preferred placement option in national policy. Cash assistance is available to both formal and informal kinship carers through the VUP (Vision Umurenge Programme) social protection scheme, rather than a standalone kinship-specific benefit.
Colombia | Prioritisation in law
Colombian law and policy prioritise kinship care as the preferred placement option ahead of other forms of alternative care.
Assessments explicitly build in a disadvantage lens: forced displacement, poverty, conflict-affected areas, and ethnic origin are all named as factors considered when placing a child. Family-tracing mechanisms exist, including for cross-border cases, through Colombia’s child protection system (ICBF, the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar), operating within administrative processes such as the Proceso Administrativo de Restablecimiento de Derechos (PARD) under Ley 1098 de 2006.
South Africa | Support for kinship care
South Africa’s universal services (healthcare, education, school nutrition, social services, and birth registration) are explicitly designed to be accessible regardless of whether a kinship care arrangement is formal or informal; this was a deliberate legislative and programme-design choice, not an incidental gap.
Informal kinship carers can access the Child Support Grant via an affidavit process, without needing a court order. The Old Age Grant is a further example of intentional design: it was built with the understanding that it also supports dependants (commonly orphaned grandchildren) in an elderly carer’s household, making it a child-centred response even though it is nominally a grant for the caregiver.
UK | Registration and social services
UK local authorities are under a statutory duty to consider kinship (or “connected persons”) placement before unrelated foster care whenever a child cannot remain with their parents.
Where a child becomes formally “looked after,” kinship carers go through a staged assessment: an initial, time-limited viability assessment allows the child to be placed quickly, with a full fostering assessment (or a Special Guardianship application) completed afterward. Approved carers, recognised as “connected persons foster carers”, are subject to the same statutory safeguarding checks and home assessments as any foster carer, plus ongoing care planning and review. This preference is set in statute: under the Children Act 1989, s.22C(7)(a), when deciding where a looked-after child should live, the local authority must give preference to a placement with a connected person (a relative, friend, or other person connected with the child) who is also an approved local authority foster parent, ahead of placement with an unrelated foster carer or in a children’s home.
South Africa | National data
South Africa’s government digital data systems include kinship care, captured via household-head and primary-caregiver fields rather than a dedicated ‘kinship care’ category.
Unusually among the countries surveyed, that data is disaggregated both by the gender of the carer and by their formal/informal status. It is gathered partly through population-level surveys (for example, surveys on violence against children), not only through administrative case records, which broadens what the data can capture beyond people already known to the child protection system.
Learn more, get involved: download the campaign pack below
Work in child rights?
Join our community.
Our ‘Kinship Care’ community group on our Changemakers for Children platform is a community space hosted and moderated by Family for Every Child.
The group is primarily aimed at practitioners and service providers working with children on the move, but is also relevant to programme managers, policy makers and academics working in the sector.
