When Care Ends, Who Takes Over?

“As Leave No Youth Behind reaches the end of its five-year run, the question is no longer only
how to help young people leave care, but whether the system will remember them once they do.”
Five years is a long time in the life of a development project. It is also a short time in the life of a
young person. Turning 18 is supposed to mark the beginning of adulthood. For someone leaving
alternative care, however, it can also mean leaving behind the structure that has supported them
through childhood. A home, a caregiver, a school and a familiar support network do not
automatically become a job, rent, financial security and a sense of belonging. Leaving care is an
administrative event; becoming independent is a social process.

That is the problem Leave No Youth Behind set out to address. Implemented by SOS Children’s
Villages Ethiopia from 2022 to 2026, the five-year project focused on young people leaving
alternative care, but its ambition extended beyond individual assistance. It tries to strengthen
young people’s ability to transition into independent adulthood while also pushing the institutions
around them to recognise care leaving as a policy issue. By the end of the project, SOS reports
that 1,259 young care leavers had received direct support. Three care-leaver associations
representing 749 members were strengthened, a national coalition was established, and 1,407
care professionals and government social workers received capacity-building support. The
project also reports reaching approximately 2.5 million people through media and community
awareness activities.

Those numbers give a sense of scale, but they do not by themselves tell us whether the project
succeeded. A better question is what remains after the project has ended.
There is evidence that the project moved the conversation beyond individual support. In June
2025, Ethiopia adopted the Minimum Standards for Preparation of Leaving Care and Aftercare
Support, establishing a national framework for preparing young people to leave alternative care
and for providing support afterwards. The standards set out responsibilities for care providers
and relevant government institutions and recognise areas including education, health, housing,
employment and social support. They became effective on June 11, 2025.

That may be one of the project’s more significant contributions. Rather than treating the
transition to adulthood as something that happens when a young person simply reaches the
required age, the framework recognises that leaving care requires preparation and continuing
support. SOS also says the standards were developed with the participation of care-experienced
young people, giving care leavers a role in shaping the system intended to support them.
But this is also where the limits of a five-year project become apparent.

A policy framework does not automatically create housing. A guideline does not create a job.
Registration in a data system does not by itself provide an income. And an organisation can help
a young person navigate these difficulties without being able to guarantee that the support will
still exist years later.

SOS’s own account of the project’s final phase acknowledges some of these continuing barriers,
including difficulties accessing legal identification, financial services, employment and other
essential services. At the project’s closing forum, young care leavers themselves raised the need
for continued support, while government and other stakeholders discussed how the gains could
be sustained beyond the project.

That makes the project’s legacy more complicated and interesting than a simple success story.
Leave No Youth Behind appears to have done something important: it helped move care leave
from being primarily an individual transition to being a subject of policy, and institutional
discussion. It supported young people directly, helped organise care leavers themselves and
contributed to a national framework that did not previously exist in its current form. The creation
of the National Care Leavers Association Coalition is particularly significant because it gives
care-experienced young people a collective voice rather than leaving them solely as recipients of
services.

But the project’s achievements also reveal the size of the problem.
Ethiopia’s 2004 National Youth Policy defines youth as people aged 15 to 29 and describes
young people as participants in, and beneficiaries of, the country’s economic, social, cultural and
democratic development. A care leaver is still a young person under that definition. Yet unlike
many young Ethiopians who can rely on parents or relatives during the difficult transition into
adulthood, a care leaver may have fewer informal safety nets to fall back on.
This creates a difficult question for the system: when a young person leaves care, who takes
over?

The answer cannot permanently be an NGO. SOS can provide support, build capacity, advocate
for policy change and help create networks. But the purpose of systems advocacy is ultimately to
make support less dependent on a particular project being present.

That is why the implementation of the new national standards may matter more than the closing
of Leave No Youth Behind. SOS and the National Care Leavers Association Coalition are now
calling for stronger government ownership, including dedicated resources and integration of the
standards into the licensing and renewal processes of care institutions. The standards have
reportedly been rolled out across ten regional states and reached more than 130 care service
providers, but implementation remains at an early stage.

So the fairest assessment of Leave No Youth Behind may be neither that it solved the problem
nor that it failed to do so. Rather it helped move the problem.

It helped move it from individual young people struggling after leaving care toward a broader
conversation about responsibility, policy and institutional support. It helped create tools and
organisations that did not previously exist in the same form. But it didn’t and couldn’t remove the
structural conditions that make the transition difficult.

For a 17-year-old preparing to leave care, the end of a five-year development project is not the
end of a project. It is simply another point in her life.

A few years later, she may have a different question: What happens if I lose my job? Where do I
go if I cannot pay my rent? Who helps me replace a lost document? Who do I call when I have no
one else to call?

Those questions will ultimately determine whether the new framework becomes a functioning
system.

The success of Leave No Youth Behind, then, may not be measured by whether SOS can continue
supporting every young person it reached. It may be measured by whether the institutions around
those young people have become capable of remembering them after the project is gone.Because
leaving care should mean entering adulthood not disappearing from the system.