When a child returns to Ukraine after being displaced, separated from their family, or affected by the war, the first hours and days are critical. Who assesses their needs? Who coordinates their care? Who makes sure nothing falls through the cracks as they move between agencies, services, and systems?
Ukraine's Coordination Center for the Development of Family Upbringing and Child Care (CC) has just taken a major step toward ensuring every returning child is provided with the full range of support, by digitizing its child protection case management through CPIMS+. It's a milestone worth recognizing and a story worth learning from, because the "why" and "how" behind this launch offer real lessons for any country building, enhancing, or rebuilding, its child protection infrastructure under pressure.
The Problem: Coordination Without a Common System
Reintegrating returned children is not a single agency's job. It involves government ministries, the Coordination Center, international partners, NGOs, and local service providers, all of whom need to act on the same information, often within tight timeframes. Without a shared digital system, this coordination has historically relied on phone calls, emails, and manually cross-referencing spreadsheets, slow by design, and risky for children whose situations can change quickly.
The Numbers, First Month In
First month into implementation, the system is steadily taking shape: 1,577 cases have been migrated by the second week, while eight service provider agencies are onboarding. This early progress underscores the foundation being built for scale, ensuring agencies and case managers can work from the same system to strengthen reintegration and child protection.
What It Looks Like from the Front Line
Numbers describe scale, but they don't describe what changes are changing for the people doing the work.
At its core, CPIMS+ applies a case management approach, in line with the best global practices in child protection. Every child's case follows a consistent, structured pathway from identification and assessment, through service provision, to case closure, regardless of which organization is handling which piece of it.
Digitizing that process means case managers work from a single system with a single database reconciling records across organizations. Agencies stop unknowingly repeating each other's work, and gaps become visible instead of surfacing months later as a missed follow-up. One case worker describes what that looks like in practice:
Coordination also becomes structural, not personal. The Coordination Centre can now oversee and coordinate every actor involved in a child's reintegration through the system itself, rather than depending on individual relationships and manual updates. As another caseworker puts it:
"Child protection is never one organization's job. With Primero, when I refer a child to a partner organization, I know it reaches the right person, I can see when they've accepted it, and I can track what support is being provided, without a single phone call to find out. That kind of coordination used to take days. Now it takes minutes. For children in crisis, those days matter".
This isn't a story about software efficiency for its own sake, it's a story about the days a child waits for a referral to be accepted, and what it means to shrink that waiting time to minutes.
Why This Matters for Ukraine's Better Care Reform
This launch is not happening in isolation. It represents a concrete milestone in Ukraine’s Better Care Reform and directly contributes to the implementation of the Strategy’s sixth strategic objective, which focuses on creating the organizational and legal conditions needed to strengthen digital tools, improve access to information and alternative care services, and increase transparency, accountability, and efficiency across the child welfare system. Digitized and coordinated case management is what transforms reform from a policy framework into a functioning system on the ground, enabling services to be monitored, measured, and continuously improved.
The Better Care Reform seeks to transform Ukraine’s childcare system so that every child can grow up in a safe, loving and nurturing family environment. As Ukraine advances efforts to reintegrate children and strengthen family support services, family reunification and placement in family-based care remain essential priorities. CPIMS+ equips the Government of Ukraine and its partners with the tools needed to identify vulnerabilities, coordinate services, manage cases effectively, and support informed decisions that place children's best interests at the centre of care and reintegration efforts.
Beyond strengthening a modern and digitized child protection system, CPIMS+ helps turn policy commitments into tangible outcomes for children and families. By enabling timely, coordinated, and accountable case management, it supports every child’s right to grow up, thrive, and reach their full potential in a safe and supportive family environment.
The Bigger Lesson
What makes Ukraine's rollout instructive isn't just the technology, it's the sequencing. Case management best practice came first, and digitization followed to support it, not replace it. Coordination was designed as a system-level function, not an individual one. The caseworkers doing the work are the ones whose daily experience validates whether it's working.
For any government or organization strengthening child protection systems, especially in contexts involving displacement, separation, or crisis response, that's the real takeaway: start with the case management approach, then let the system serve it. Ukraine's Coordination Center, alongside its partners, has shown what that looks like.