Supporting the development, strengthening, and coordination of child protection systems to ensure children are free from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation.
Care reform transforms systems that separate children into systems that strengthen families.
For children, this means preventing unnecessary separation and ensuring those who cannot remain at home grow up in safe, family care.
Care reform succeeds when systems are built to support children and families first.
Around the world, too many children are separated from their families, not because they lack care, but because systems fail to support families when they face poverty, crisis, displacement, disability, conflict, or exclusion. Care reform changes this reality. It is the long-term work of redesigning policies, services, financing, and practices to strengthen families, prevent child-family separation and make sure that children who cannot remain with their parents grow up in safe, nurturing family-based alternative care.
Ensuring children grow up in families matters because where and how children grow up shapes their lifelong wellbeing. Decades of evidence show that residential care undermines healthy development, while strong families protect and uphold children’s rights, health, and wellbeing. Yet reforming care systems is complex. It requires more than individual programs; it demands coordinated, system-wide change across the social protection, child protection, health, education, and justice sectors.
Maestral International is globally recognized for advancing care reform utilizing a systems-strengthening approach that bridges policy, practice, and learning. What sets us apart is our capacity and commitment to enhancing laws and policies, financing, data systems, and the workforce to better support children and families, helping systems to reform sustainably. We do this using inclusive and participatory approaches that recognize the inherent value of lived experience.
Family Strengthening & Prevention of Unnecessary Separation
Supporting families through services, social protection, and community systems so children can remain in safe and nurturing families.
Family- and Community-Based Alternative Care
Strengthening and expanding family-based alternative care, including kinship care, foster care, guardianship, kafalah, supported independent living, promoting safe and sustained reintegration, and ethical adoption practice.
Transforming Residential Care
Supporting planned, child-centered transitions away from residential care while repurposing resources to strengthen family- and community-based care.
Through the Care Reform Thematic Hub, Maestral brings together decades of direct work with children and families, global engagement, and evidence building to support governments, non-government organizations, faith leaders, and funders to navigate sustainable system reform. The Hub is a space for shared learning and innovation, grounded in real-world implementation and shaped by collaboration with those closest to the system, including people with lived experience of care.
Through groundbreaking global initiatives—including the FCDO Global Charter on Children’s Care Reform, Better Care Ukraine, and Changing the Way We Care—Maestral has advanced care reform as coordinated, system-wide change grounded in family-based care. The projects below highlight some of Maestral’s Care Reform work.
Global Charter for Children’s Care Reform
Global
Maestral International, together with the Better Care Network, serves as technical advisor to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) on the Global Campaign on Children’s Care Reform. In this role, Maestral supports the implementation of the Global Charter on Children’s Care Reform, including coordinating technical assistance to prospective and confirmed Charter signatories to develop and deliver high-quality commitments. Support to governments can include assessments of national care systems using Maestral’s Global Campaign Care System Assessment tool, facilitation of participatory processes, guidance on evidence and best practice, and technical review of draft commitments. Assistance for implementation may include reviews of training programmes, adaptation of tools and methodologies, development of best practice briefs, support for data collection, and facilitation of child participation. Maestral also strengthens capacity within FCDO and key partners through learning on global best practices, technical guidance on strategic priorities, and support for monitoring, evaluation, and peer-to-peer exchange. This work advances commitments to strengthen families, expand family-based alternative care, and end institutional care worldwide.
Changing the Way We Care
Global
Changing The Way We CareSM (“CTWWC”) was a bold initiative designed to promote safe, nurturing family care for children living in institutions or at risk of child–family separation. It focused on strengthening families and reforming national systems of care, including family reunification and reintegration and the development of family-based alternative care, in line with the United Nations Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children. CTWWC was a consortium of three partners—Catholic Relief Services, Lumos, and Maestral International—joined through a Global Development Alliance (GDA) by three donors: the MacArthur Foundation, USAID, and GHR Foundation. Initially launched in Kenya, Guatemala and Moldova, the initiative later expanded to include Haiti and India and influence efforts in dozens more countries around the globe. The initiative was launched around growing global recognition and evidence that care reform required sustainable solutions grounded in coordination across national, regional and global stakeholders. CTWWC leveraged this momentum to help advance care reform toward a tipping point where systems, services, attitudes, and practice increasingly focused on keeping children in safe and nurturing family care.
Better Care Ukraine
Europe and Central Asia
Maestral is working with UNICEF and the Government of Ukraine to support the Better Care reform, aimed at ensuring all children grow up in safe, nurturing, family- and community-based environments. This work supports the implementation of Ukraine’s National Strategy for Ensuring the Right of Every Child to Grow Up in a Family Environment (2024-2028), strengthens alignment with EU and global best practices, and responds to the heightened needs of children and families during war at the humanitarian-development nexus.
Maestral supports the advancement and implementation of integrated social services and alternative family care through capacity strengthening, methodological guidance, training packages, and technical briefs. This includes specialised foster care tools for children with disabilities, reintegration guidelines for returned children, and best practices on the transformation of institutions. Maestral has assessed the social sector workforce across five regions, reviewed pre-service curricula, and contributed technical assistance to workforce strengthening efforts at the national level. In support of the Government of Ukraine’s Coordination Centre, Maestral has developed a suite of costing tools, from national to community level, and service costing models to support planning, budgeting, and advocacy. Across sectors, Maestral supports the cross-sectoral integration of Better Care, and provides guidance on technical areas such as safeguarding, parenting, and juvenile diversion. Maestral also supports monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning efforts, including leading the multi-cohort Next Generation learning programme for UNICEF staff.
Feasibility Study for Child Guarantee
Europe and Central Asia
In 2015, the European Parliament called on the European Commission and the European Union Member States, “ to introduce a Child Guarantee so that every child in poverty can have access to free healthcare, free education, free childcare, decent housing and adequate nutrition, as part of a European integrated plan to combat child poverty”. Following the subsequent request by the Parliament to the Commission to implement a Preparatory Action to explore the potential scope of a Child Guarantee for vulnerable children, the Commission ordered a study to analyse the feasibility of such a scheme. Maestral consultants developed the Target Group Discussion Paper on Children in Alternative Care for this feasibility study.
Morocco Foster Family Pilot Capitalization Project
Middle East and North Africa
Maestral International supported the Fondation Amane pour la Protection de l’Enfance (FAPE) Association to consolidate its expertise in foster care and self-assess the foster care project’s results. The team also supported FAPE to document, organize and strengthen its processes and related tools in comprehensive and clear operating procedures aligned with best practice. The assignment also identifies how foster care practice implemented by FAPE, and other organisations in Morocco, align with international standards and best practice.
National Study on Cost Analysis of Institutional Care for Children and Family Based Care in India
South Asia
Together with the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) and Cornerstone, Maestral completed the second and third phases of a study with UNICEF India. The first phase was conducted by CRS India and Changing the Way We Care. The Study on Cost Analysis explored links between investments, needs, and outcomes and generated evidence to build a strong case for making the transition from institutions to family-based alternative care. The main objectives of the study included 1) understand trends in public budget allocation for children’s care, income and expenditure, and utilization at the government level; 2) compare cost investment for children in childcare institutions (CCI) and for those in family-based care based on the relevant legal framework; and 3) build evidence for investment in childcare reform, especially family-based alternative care, and recommend systemic steps for the transition. The findings of the study will be used to further the cause for family-based alternative care in India.
