Care for Children and the Thai Government have just launched the first ever national media campaign to raise awareness of foster care.

In Thailand, one of the key challenges facing the development of foster care services is the number of foster parents compared to the numbers of children in institutional care. There are far fewer foster parents than children in need.

The growth of such services is restricted due to a lack of registration from potential foster parents. There is a need for the general public to be informed of this opportunity to care for orphans and other vulnerable children in their own families, supported and subsidised by the Thai government.

In response, on April 4th, Care for Children, together with the Royal Thai Government, launched the first ever national media campaign to raise awareness of foster care and to inspire and recruit more foster parents across all 77 provinces of Thailand. This was a remarkable event with senior government ministers, foster families, child welfare staff, Care for Children staff, PR agency staff, media experts, national press and 'Key Opinion Leaders' in attendance.

The campaign materials include a high-quality bilingual press release, multiple campaign videos, articles and videos from foster families and several photographs and informational posters. Three popular social media influencers with a combined following of 7 million were amongst the advocates for the campaign and press launch, which resulted in 62 media reports across TV, radio and digital media with an estimated reach of 2.7 million people.

With the recent roll-out of new guidelines for all residential care facilities and the successful launch of this campaign, our hope is that the 29 government child welfare homes (also known as orphanages), which Care for Children has trained, will see a significant increase in the number of children being placed into new foster families.