by Mark Waddington CBE, Chief Executive, Hope and Homes for Children
I’m currently in Ukraine. Kyiv is under sustained aerial bombardment. And in the middle of it all, I’m seeing something that has stopped me in my tracks – the extraordinary courage of families who are choosing to protect children.
What conflict does to children without families
The frequency of aerial bombardments here in Kyiv is increasing. Significantly. The food hall captured in the video above was destroyed in a missile attack, as was the adjacent local market and a large retail and office block. This is civilian infrastructure. And it impacts everyone. Especially children.
In 2024, the UN verified 41,370 grave violations against children. This is the highest number ever recorded. More than 473 million children, 1 in 6 globally, are now growing up in conflict-affected areas. The share of the world’s children living in conflict zones has nearly doubled since the 1990s. Conflict is no longer an exception in childhood. For millions of children, it is now just part of childhood.
Violence like this, and the nightly wail of air raid sirens, heighten anxiety and its effects are amplified by chronic sleep deprivation. Parents, already close to burnt out, struggle to buffer this anxiety for their children and help them regulate their emotions. That buffering matters enormously. It’s essential for how children learn to self-regulate, which in turn is critical for neurological development, mental health and immune function. Even partially effective buffering is important.
Now imagine what this means for children in orphanages with no carer to do that buffering, where the orphanage shift workers are themselves close to burnt out.
Meet Sasha and Olena*
They are currently fostering ten children. Long term. Among them are four children who came from orphanages, and a girl with severe disabilities. I won’t name the children for safeguarding reasons, but I will tell you about the people caring for them.
Sasha and Olena have been offering love and protection to children in their care since 2011. Six other children have grown up with them over the years, including a boy who arrived at night in handcuffs, literally dumped on their doorstep. He grew up, left, but still keeps in regular touch with his foster family.
This family does all of this in the middle of a war.
Sasha serves in the Territorial Defence Force. During the day he works and tends the family’s livestock. At night, he’s part of the effort to knock out Russian drones. Olena keeps the children calm by making soup which they then carry down into their improvised bomb shelter in the cellar when the sirens wail.
They know the consequences of aerial bombardment first-hand. Their roof was damaged in one attack. Hope and Homes for Children supported them to repair it, and we continue to provide financial support and training. Because fostering is an intense, constantly demanding responsibility in normal circumstances, even without a war. Luida now also helps to train other foster parents.
Why orphanages make things worse
Right now, 1.2 million children are living in orphanages and institutions across the world’s most fragile regions. To put that in context, the number of children living in orphanages in conflict zones would fill Wembley Stadium 13 times over. And 80% of them are not orphans. They are in orphanages because systems have failed them, not because they have no one to go home to.
Children in orphanages have no one to make the decision to flee, nowhere to go, and no legal guardian to act for them. They are trapped in fixed buildings, exposed to exactly the kind of attack I’m witnessing here. Staff flee or are conscripted. Supply chains for food, water and medicine collapse. Concentrated and without legal guardians, children become targets for traffickers and exploitative actors. This is not hypothetical. It has been documented across Syria, Yemen, Sudan and we are seeing it happen in real time now in Ukraine.
Children should not be punished for their circumstances. They need the opportunity to grow up in properly supported families.
That’s what Sasha and Olena represent. And they are not alone.
Building systems that last
Alongside supporting individual families like theirs, our team in Ukraine is building sustainable prevention and emergency care systems. Systems that will continue long after our direct involvement ends.
In Rokytne, our team has worked alongside the local Council to develop a family support centre that runs outreach services and delivers a packed programme on site: speech therapy for traumatised children, counselling for burnt-out parents, structured play for internally displaced children, and referral into medical services.
We launched the service late last year within the existing budgetary cycle, sharing costs with the Council while our specialists augmented their provision. The Council will take on the full costs in the next cycle — giving the community a platform to develop and, eventually, run these services themselves.
We’re delivering similar work across the country thanks to the generosity of our supporters.
Care reform is crisis preparedness
Ukraine is undertaking a bold and remarkable thing, it is seeking to deinstitutionalise its childcare system despite the war. And in doing so, it is proving why our call to make deinstitutionalisation a critical part of crisis preparedness and emergency response is so important.
Deinstitutionalisation or moving children out of orphanages and Back to Family, is sometimes seen as a long-term reform agenda. Something for peacetime. Being here, I want to challenge that more forcefully than ever.
Care reform is crisis preparedness. The most effective way to protect children in conflict is to act before it starts. We know which regions are volatile. We know which children are most at risk. The window to act exists now.
We have thirty years of evidence for this. Hope and Homes for Children was founded in Bosnia in 1994 at the moment the Bosnian War exposed the catastrophic failure of institutional care in conflict. We’ve been operating in Ukraine since 1998, including throughout the full-scale invasion. We know what works. And we know what the cost of inaction looks like.
Sasha, Olena, and the ten children in their care are proof of what’s possible when a child is given a family instead of an orphanage.
Before conflict hits, get children Back to Family.
You can support our work in Ukraine. Donate here or read more about what we do in Ukraine.
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
