It took the 2009 report of an eight-month-old boy being raped in an Accra care-house to alert Ghanaian officials that all might not be well with their country’s orphanages. Investigators of the rape discovered to their shock that, of the 32 children living in the orphanage, 27 were not orphans.

Since then, the Social Welfare Department has reported that only eight of the 148 orphanages currently in operation throughout the country are licensed, and that as many as 90% of the 4,500 children living in these homes have not lost both parents.

Young children are highly effective for fundraising. Ghana’s non-profit Child Rights International (CRI) estimates that a small orphanage could pull in as much as $70,000 a year with the vast majority of their funding coming from international donors and NGOs. However, CRI suggests that as little as 30% of yearly earnings are spent on child care.

Ghana isn’t alone in supporting a gross exploitation of children – roughly 28% of the 12,000 Cambodian children living in orphanages have lost both parents, and in Sierra Leone the number of true orphans living in a care-house is a minuscule 7%.

CRI’s Apiah explains that child-collectors target impoverished and rural communities where they “exploit the poverty and ignorance of parents” with promises of cash and an education for their children. There is a practice in some West African countries where poor families will send their children away to be cared for by relatives or caretakers who have the means to provide more for them, and many orphanages exploit this practice by having illiterate parents sign documents that sever all legal rights to their child.

“The problem stems from…systemic failure, which encourages the proliferation of unlicensed and unmonitored orphanage,” Apiah said. “These problems will be there as long as we continue to lack a firm social safety net to support poor parents to raise their children.”

Fred Sakyi Boafo, the National Coordinator of Orphanages and Vulnerable Children (OVC) has been pushing for placing children back in homes, whether with parents or surviving relatives, or with trained Foster Parents. He claims that when children stay in an orphanage rather than with a family unit it actually costs more to send them to school and provide care.

Joachim Theis, UNICEF head of child protection for West Africa, agrees when he says “A range of solutions, from safety nets to foster care to community care, have been shown to work, and re much cheaper than putting children in orphanages. Putting children into institutionalized care instead of a family setting must always be a last resort.”

It is also the responsibility of foreign donors and NGOs to thoroughly research the organizations they give money to as blind generosity is capable of causing more harm than good.

–Lydia Caswell

Sources: Irin News, Ghana Web, Ghana Web
Photo: Orphan Aid Africa