Location: Home-based
SOS Children's Villages is the world’s largest non-governmental organisation focused on supporting children without parental care and families at risk. Since 1949, it has been working to ensure that children grow up in a loving family environment and have their rights fulfilled. SOS Children‘s Villages provides care in settings other than the child’s or young person’s immediate or extended family. The most common alternative care services offered by SOS Children’s Villages globally are family-like care, foster family care, small group homes and supervised independent living arrangements. Family strengthening services are also an integral part of SOS Children’s Villages. In line with the preamble of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, SOS Children’s Villages firmly believes that the family is ‘the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children.’ Setting up the service in a locally-contextualized way, it works to ensure that children’s and young people’s rights are fully realised within their family of origin. SOS Children’s Villages supports and advocates for children without parental care or at the risk of losing it who live in extremely disadvantaged circumstances, for their overall development.
Background
This year, SOS Children’s Villages has instituted an expert group[1] to guide the strengthening of early childhood education and development to avert the challenges faced by children in alternative care and family strengthening programmes. The expert group will support the federation to focus childcare professionals in delivering high quality services to children below eight years of age from target group families and communities. The expert group also aims to identify the potential gaps in relation to Early Childhood Development (ECD) services in the federation regarding return on investment in ECD interventions. The group further aims to achieve a more structured and improved ECD integration in existing programmes in the federation.
The team envisions to have all key stakeholders (particularly the caregivers) with improved skills and knowledge on ECD services. This will ultimately enable the children in the SOS Children’s Villages programmes who have lost parental care or are at the risk of losing such care to effectively learn, communicate, grow, and develop with positive social interactions to realise their full potential.
Purpose
The purpose of the consultancy is to gain a concrete picture on strengths and weaknesses with regards to ECD of SOS Children’s Villages in Alternative Care and Family Strengthening services. Based on this, specific recommendations on how to improve ECD services in both Alternative Care and Family Strengthening service are proposed.
For more detail, please visit
Terms of Reference for conducting a study on the ECD policies and practices of SOS Children’s Villages - SOS Children's Villages International (sos-childrensvillages.org)