Africa is renowned for its beauty, its natural heritage and prolific resourcesbut equally, the image of its suffering children haunts the conscience of our Continent and the world. (Nelson Mandela, 2 August 1996) Residential child and youth care is the cornerstone of services to vulnerable children and youths at risk of homelessness and requiring professional support in their formative years. Before residential care became popular in countries across the world, it was the onus of local

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... es collectively to raise their children to become responsible citizens. These communities employed indigenous and traditional means and values handed down from one generation to the next. Inadvertently practising the spirit of ubuntu, these communities took on the responsibility of raising a child with the understanding that every child belonged to the whole village. This text, Residential Child and Youth Care in a Developing World, provides practitioners working in the field of childcare with evidence-based information about the challenges and opportunities that are prevalent in 19 countries in Africa when working in residential child and youth care. The likely audiences of this book are child and youth care practitioners, and also every person with a vested interest in the care and protection of young people. This text is strategically presented as an offering to Africa. This fourth volume features 19 of the 54 countries from a continent that is embedded in the Global South and recognised as integral to the developing world. This text seeks to analyse some of the challenges and barriers that exist within each country's unique structures and service delivery implementation. Having been reliant on texts from the West for my own studies in child and youth care, I was curious to read the contributions from colleagues on the African continent. At first glance, I was confident that this offering would provide much-needed insights and analyses into