We live in an age when almost anything can be measured — and now, for the first time, that includes the care of children who cannot live with their parents. Victoria Olarte, Senior Strategic Research Partner at Hope and Homes for Children, reflects on the launch of ICare, the new UN-endorsed global standard for children’s alternative care, and what it means for children living apart from their families.
What is ICare, and why now?
The world has become remarkably good at counting. There is an international classification for every disease a person can be diagnosed with, every tonne of carbon a country emits, every dollar that crosses a border. These standards let governments spot an epidemic, track a crisis, direct a budget — and let the rest of us check whether they did. What gets counted is more likely to be acted on. Yet until now, there was no agreed way to count the alternative care of children.
That changed in March 2026, when the United Nations Statistical Commission endorsed the International Classification of Alternative Care of Children — ICare: the world’s first agreed, common statistical standard for defining, counting and classifying the alternative care of children, wherever in the world the data is gathered.
Hope and Homes for Children warmly welcomes UNICEF’s recent launch of ICare. My colleague Stephen Ucembe and I were part of the expert group that developed it, and it was genuinely heartening to work alongside professionals who have spent decades, like us, reforming child care systems in their own countries. We worked together to understand what is shared and what differs across borders, cultures and languages, to build something that holds true to children’s lives across such different contexts.
Why counting children matters
Across much of the world, children in alternative care have been statistically invisible. Governments have been making decisions about care systems — about funding, about policy, about services — without reliable or comparable data on how many children are actually in care, what type of care they’re in, or what happens to them over time. The best estimate is that 5.4 million children are living in institutions worldwide. You cannot plan a care system you cannot accurately see. You cannot reform what you cannot measure. And you cannot hold a government accountable for children who never appear in its own records.
We have worked under the guidance of the UN Guidelines on Alternative Care of Children since 2009, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for decades before that, alongside a growing body of evidence on the harms of institutionalisation. One of the things missing has been a common, credible, internationally agreed tool for measurement. ICare is that tool — and it adds something none of those other frameworks could: the ability to count.
Data as a catalyst for change
At Hope and Homes for Children, we have long pursued data as a catalyst for change. In Rwanda, we led a national survey that gave the government its first accurate picture of children living in institutions, and the evidence base for the national reform strategy that followed. In Ukraine, we led a comparable audit of residential facilities that became the hard evidence behind the national deinstitutionalisation strategy. Across our programmes, data informs action — but a survey is hard-won, and only a snapshot. ICare goes further, embedding that counting into the routine business of government and becoming a living record.
This is data with a purpose. In ICare’s own stated objectives, the statistics it generates should be grounded in human rights and should strengthen governments’ capacity to prevent unnecessary family separation — prioritising family-based care, deinstitutionalisation and safe transitions for care leavers: the very goals our movement has pursued for decades, now built into the purpose of the data itself. In time, it will reveal, country by country and year by year, how care systems are shifting, how children’s needs and experiences are changing, and whether commitments are translating into action on the ground — holding governments accountable not just in principle, but in data.
What happens next
ICare’s hardest work is still ahead: turning a global standard into routine national data requires investment, training and years of patient system-building — not a job for statisticians alone. Civil society has a role too, alongside governments, UNICEF and national statistics offices: bringing frontline knowledge of how children enter, experience and leave care, helping build capacity, and keeping the data honest.
We’re grateful to UNICEF for leading this work, and to the UN Statistical Commission for endorsing ICare as the global standard it now is. ICare will not reform a care system on its own. But it will make it far harder to ignore what those systems are doing. The children we can count are the children we can protect — and this standard is the most concrete global move yet towards making sure every child counts.
That’s what ICare is ultimately in service of: helping more children find their way Back to Family.
