From Direct Support to Systems Change
How years of prevention practice led to a global initiative focused on helping systems recognise vulnerability earlier.
Main question
How did the Child Visibility Initiative begin?
Arsen Tomsky
Founder and CEO of inDrive; founder of the Child Visibility Initiative
For more than a decade, Arsen Tomsky has supported initiatives that help create more opportunities and address unfair systems.
Arsen is no stranger to the problem of vulnerable children and families. For years, he has supported Mother's Home (Ana Uyi) in Kazakhstan, and in 2023 he founded the Mother's Home International Foundation, which he continues to support. Its work would later become the ideological basis for the Child Visibility Initiative.
Mother's Home
Where it all started
Mother's Home (Ana Uyi) was founded in Kazakhstan in 2013 by Aydyn and Anar Rakhimbaev. It works with pregnant women and mothers facing serious challenges. The foundation provides early support and helps prevent avoidable family separation.
Arsen Tomsky saw the potential of the programme and supported its creation and growth. The programme was later introduced in other countries:
- Uzbekistan
- Kyrgyzstan
- Malaysia
- Ukraine
The experience demonstrated that timely support can prevent unnecessary family separation.
Learning from practice
The Power of Prevention
10k
Over more than a decade, Mother's Home has helped thousands of children avoid institutional care.
67%
Across Kazakhstan, the programme has prevented the majority of potential newborn abandonments.
Its experience has also been examined as a case study by Harvard Business School, demonstrating international interest in prevention-based approaches to child protection. The results confirmed that early intervention changes outcomes. They also revealed an important limitation. Even the strongest programme can only reach the families it directly serves.
The success of Mother's Home led Arsen to a Simple Yet Important Question:
How can we move from helping families one by one to building systems that support millions of children and families?
This question became the starting point for the Child Visibility Initiative.
A new question emerged
A Step Toward Systems Change
If timely support works, why do so many families still become visible only after a crisis?
Rather than asking how to expand a single programme, the next question became how public systems themselves could recognise vulnerability earlier, coordinate support more effectively, and maintain continuity of care across services.
This marked the transition from delivering direct support to strengthening the systems responsible for prevention.
Child Visibility Initiative
Making Real Systems Change Happen
The Child Visibility Initiative was established in 2026 as an independent research and systems initiative.
Instead of delivering services directly, the initiative develops evidence, methodologies, and practical tools that help governments, practitioners, and institutions recognise vulnerability earlier and strengthen prevention before family separation occurs.
- Child Visibility Index
- Country
diagnostics - System
analysis - Practitioner
education - International
research - Cross-sector
collaboration
Today
Visibility Before Crisis
Child Visibility is a global research and systems initiative focused on strengthening early recognition of child vulnerability.
By combining research, comparative evidence, field validation, and international collaboration, the initiative helps public systems identify opportunities for earlier intervention and build stronger pathways for prevention.
The aim is to help more children and families receive timely support before a crisis develops.