Putting Children First: Safe, Sustainable Families in Urban and Rural Communities in Tajikistan

This seed funding will enable us to demonstrate that replacing institutional care in Tajikistan with an innovative set of interventions (family support, early child development services through community-based outreach and alternative family care including foster care) has a positive effect on child brain development in the first 1000 days. The project will enhance practical skills of health workers and parents to stimulate child development and support existing institutions to build a multidisciplinary ‘Team Around the Child’. It will develop child protection legislation to create the legal infrastructure necessary to scale. The impact on improving early brain development will be achieved by keeping young children with their parents, rather than being institutionalised. The Ministry of Health and Social Protection is already engaged and will need to assume responsibility for the model through new commissioning arrangements beyond the grant period.