African Child Policy Forum Concerned Over ‘Dramatic Rise’ in Intercountry Adoptions UPDATED
“In the past eight years, international adoptions increased by almost 400%, the African Child Policy Forum has found.
“Africa is becoming the new frontier for inter-country adoption,” the Addis Ababa-based group said.
But many African countries do not have adequate safeguards in place to protect the children being adopted, it warns.
The majority of so-called orphans adopted from Africa have at least one living parent and many children are trafficked or sold by their parents, the child expert group says.
More than 41,000 African children have been adopted and taken out of home countries since 2004, the ACPF report says.
More than two thirds of the total in 2009 and 2010 were adopted from Ethiopia, which now sends more children abroad for adoption than any other country, apart from China.
Adoptable children shortage
Ethiopia has more than 70 adoption agencies, including 15 that only refer children to families in the United States.
Most African children go to the US, which is where most adoptions from foreign countries occur – in 2010 more than 11,000 children from more than 100 countries were adopted by American parents.
Families in western Europe and Canada also adopt African children.
International adoption is also popular in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Uganda, and Burkina Faso, the ACPF report says.
People wanting to adopt children are increasingly turning to Africa because changes in adoption patterns and laws in other countries has resulted in a shortage of adoptable children, it says.
Countries including China, South Korea, Guatemala, Russia, Romania and Ukraine have tightened up eligibility rules and shut down or limited overseas adoption – instead promoting domestic adoption.
According to international law, inter-country adoption should be a last resort – and the rise in the number of children being adopted in Africa and moved to other countries is of concern to child welfare experts.
“Every child has the right to be reared in the country and culture in which it was born,” said David Mugawe, the director of African Child Policy Forum.
The report warned that many countries on the continent do not have strong enough laws and policies to stem illicit activities including child trafficking.
Only 13 African countries have ratified the Hague Convention, which provides various safeguards to try to ensure children are not adopted illegally.
“Compromising children’s best interests while undertaking inter-country adoption is likely and adoption can become a vast, profit-driven, industry with children as the commodity,” the ACPF says.
“The onus is on African states to take urgent and decisive measures to strengthen families and communities to take care of children in their country of origin.”
Adoption from Africa: Concern over ‘dramatic rise’
[Updated News 5/29/12 by BBC]
“The number of African children adopted by foreign families has nearly tripled in the past eight years. Nearly 6,350 children from Africa were adopted by foreigners in 2010, compared to less than 2,240 in 2003, according to a report released on Tuesday.”
“Many orphanages in Africa are set up to generate profits for the owners, since they can receive up to $30,000 per adopted child, the report’s author says. “They were created for financial gain,” said David Mugawe, executive director of the African Child Policy Forum, which released the report Tuesday. “A lot is happening under the table.”
Of the five African countries that produce the most adopted children, none has ratified the Hague Convention, the leading international treaty on protecting children from illegal adoption. And too often the adoption of African children is cloaked in secrecy, according to Mr. Mugawe.
“Some parents are illiterate, so they don’t know what they are signing. They’re not told the whole truth,” he said. “Some are told it’s just a sponsorship for their children’s education, and they’ll get a job and return home to help their parents. They’re often told it’s just foster care for some period of time.”
Mr. Mugawe emphasized that many adoptions are legitimate, and many adoption agencies are good ones. But he said there is also evidence of frequent fraud, the sale and abduction of children, falsified documents, bribery, and children being removed from relatives who could care for them.”
“In some cases, African children can be adopted in a matter of weeks, compared to waiting periods of years in other countries, the report said.
Because of pressure from adopting countries, many African countries haven’t introduced enough safeguards to protect their children from illegal adoptions, and often they don’t make enough effort to look for informal adoption arrangements in their own countries, Mr. Mugawe said.
“Adoption can become a vast, profit-driven industry with children as the commodity,” he added. “Inter-country adoption should not be taken as an easy and convenient option. It should be a last resort and an exception, rather than the normal recourse to solving the situation of children in difficult circumstances, as it seems to have now become.”
Profit-driven adoptions turn children into a commodity
[Globe and Mail 5/29/12 by Geoffrey York]
“The bright-eyed baby is one of more than 35,000 children sent from Africa in a surge of adoptions in the last eight years, according to adoption expert Peter Selman from Newcastle University in the UK.
During that time, figures have risen three-fold at the same time as international adoptions from all countries have slumped to a 15-year low, Selman said.
A new report from The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) entitled “Africa: The New Frontier for Intercountry Adoption,” says the trend indicates that receiving countries are turning “en masse” to Africa to meet demand for adoptive children as other options close. It’s a trend, they say, that needs to stop.
“It must at all costs be discouraged. It should be a last resort and an exception rather than the normal recourse to solving the situation of children in difficult circumstances, as it seems to have now become,” said David Mugawe, executive director of the ACPF in a press statement.
The group says that the lack of regulation combined with the promise of money from abroad had turned children into “commodities in the graying and increasingly amoral world of intercountry adoption.”
“Due to the illegal nature of these acts, it has been difficult to properly document them, but it is known that there have been cases of children sold by their parents, and children abducted and later trafficked or even placed for adoption because wrongly considered orphans,” said Najat M’jid Maalla, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.
Children’s rights advocates are meeting in Ethiopia this week to consider what needs to be done to protect the continent’s children at the Fifth International Policy Conference on the African Child (IPC).
The ACPF is urging African leaders to seek family-based, national solutions to care for the estimated 58 million children on the continent who have been orphaned by war, famine and disease.”
African adoption should be discouraged ‘at all costs,’ group says
[CNN 5/29/12 by Hilary Whiteman]
Find the 73-page pdf here. Some excerpts below
Page 15 Family Preservation “family preservation measures include child support grants, cash transfers, and general social protection programmes that need to be undertaken systemically and on a larger scale. The idea of intercountry adoption as one of the main significant responses to addressing the problem of children deprived of their family environments is neither sustainable nor feasible – especially given the mammoth tasks and multi-dimensional responses needed comprehensively to address the problems associated with it. moreover, there is anecdotal evidence from some studies that an emphasis on intercountry adoption as a responseto the challenges faced by children deprived of family environments might be counterproductive –some survey data suggests that, instead of intercountry adoption helping to reduce the number of children in institutional care, it may in fact contribute to the continuation of institutional care, with resulting harm to children.”
Page 18 History “The African (including slavery and colonialism) continues to inform perspectives on intercountry adoption. Some contend that arguments advanced by detractors of intercountry adoption, labelling it a manifestation of “imperialism” and “neo-colonialism”, are not entirely baseless.9 current practice shows that a number of African countries of origin tend to send children being adopted predominantly to the countries that were their respective former colonisers. for instance, a significant number of adoptions from french-speaking Africa go to France10, and there is evidence that adoptions from Guinea-Bissau are frequently destined for Spain.11 failure to address this sensitively leaves the process of adoption open to being labelled as “a new form of colonialism” or “imperialism”.”
Page 19 Culture “The potency of culture context in political, legal, and social discourse in Africa is enormous. As a result, cultural practices inform children’s rights in Africa to a great extent. The extended family (and kinship care) plays a huge role in childcare in Africa. A number of studies13 highlight the role of the extended family and kinship care on the African continent in promoting the rights and welfare of children deprived of their family environment. There is a substantial amount of literature to support the argument that, though it has grown smaller through time, the extended family continues to provide support for children deprived of their family environment by the death of biological parents or other legal guardians.”
Pages 19 and 20 Customary Adoption ” Customary adoption is conducted by agreement between families as custom requires, and not through the courts. 17customary adoption continues to exist in a number of African countries, including Burkina Faso, 18Cameroon, Ethiopia, 19 Ghana,20 Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone, 21 South Africa, Swaziland,22 and Uganda. In Ethiopia, for instance, while different forms and rules exist in relation to customary adoption depending upon the ethnic, religious and regional groupings involved, 23 the practice still occurs. The Government of Ethiopia has called it “a very deep-rooted… highly valued and socially endorsed act”
Page 20 HIV/AIDS” The HIV/AIDS pandemic is one factor of the social that is worthy of note. it is a critical area of concern for Africa, responsible for growing numbers of orphaned children that raise issues of children’s rights to parental or family care, or to alternative care when deprived of a family environment. While the majority of orphans are absorbed by extended families, a significant number are institutionalised. The debate over the institutionalisation of HIV/AIDS orphans continues to be controversial. Experience in countries such as Botswana and Uganda shows that timely initiation of antiretroviral therapy significantly reduces HIV-related orphanhood 30; but the decline in funding for prevention measures in a number of countries, such as Swaziland, Lesotho, and Ghana, is also contributing to the negative impact of the epidemic. 31 Unfortunately, even with the significant gains that have been achieved through treatment scale-up, sub-Saharan Africa’s HIV epidemic continues to outpace the response. 32
Page 21 Religion “In relation to in Africa, Africa is home to 27% of the world’s Muslim population. 33 As a result, Sharia, which is a religious set of principles based on the four pillars of islam, is applicable in many countries on the continent. Adoption, which fits squarely within personal status law, remains not only an unrecognised institution in Sharia but, through interpretation, a prohibited one. 34 The position of Sharia law on adoption in African countries needs to be taken into account, with sensitivity, by both receiving and sending countries.”
Page 32 Who is Adoptable “Throughout the Hague Convention, the word “adoptable” appears only twice 87 and “adoptability” appears once. 88 These terms are not defined anywhere in the treaty. This leaves the interpretation of the term to the individual sending countries.”
Page 34 Abandonment “Abandonment does not (and should not) often automatically lead to adoptability. In Ethiopia, for instance, one of the main safeguards set in place to counter a premature determination of the adoptability of abandoned children is a compulsory requirement that, before an abandoned child is made available for adoption, the child must stay in an orphanage for a minimum of two months. This, it is believed, is to allow for a period of grace in case any person would come to claim the child. However, in many African countries, the nature of efforts by police or other competent bodies to trace families, and a shared acceptance of how and for how long tracing efforts are to be conducted before abandonment is declared, remain elusive.”
Page 36 Psychosocial and Medical Adoptability “Though adoptability establishes the fact that a child is legally adoptable, determination of adoptability should go beyond the legal decision 119: It should also establish that the child is both emotionally and medically capable of benefiting from adoption. It is wrong to assume that all children who are permanently deprived of their original family environment are ready to reap the benefits of a permanent new one.”
Page 37 Poverty ” Poverty is often one of the main reasons why parents abandon or voluntarily relinquish their children. 128 in addition, many children taken away from their original families come from homes where parental neglect is sometimes barely distinguishable from the effects of dire poverty. 129 This reality is arguably more acute in Africa than in any other region in the world.
To borrow Smolin’s words, “there is a palpable cruelty to taking away the children of the poor””
Also look at Page 41-42 on residency requirements; Matching on Page 47; and Law Reform on page 63-66.
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update:
“African Child Policy Forum, a group based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia has alerted on the new wave of child adoption from Africa by foreign nationals, as a recent report showed a dramatic rise in the number being adopted from the continent.
The African countries where international adoptions are said to be on the rise include Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Uganda, and Burkina Faso.
In Nigeria particularly, aside the adoption by foreign nationals, cases of child abuse such as the use of underage for street hawking, alms begging and house-helps remain a challenge despite the domestication and adoption of the Child Right Law by over 14 states including Lagos.
While countries like China, South Korea, Guatemala, Russia, Romania and Ukraine have tightened up eligibility rules making it a lot difficulty for international adoption, and instead, promoting domestic adoption, the near absence of well defined policy and legal framework to guide adoption in Africa, has forced foreign nationals to look in the direction of the continent for child adoption.
According to African Child Policy Forum, in the past eight years, international adoptions increased by almost 400 percent. “Africa is becoming the new frontier for inter-country adoption,” the group said. This is happening as investigations showed that many African countries do not have adequate safeguards in place to protect the children being adopted, it warns.
The majority of so-called orphans adopted from Africa have at least one living parent and many children are trafficked or sold by their parents, the child expert group said. It further disclosed that more than 41,000 African children have been adopted and taken out of their home countries since 2004, while more than two-thirds of the total in 2009 and 2010 were adopted from Ethiopia, which now sends more children abroad for adoption than any other country, apart from China.
“Compromising children’s best interests while undertaking inter-country adoption is likely and adoption can become a vast, profit-driven, industry with children as the commodity,” the African Child Policy Forum report said. David Mugawe, the group’s director said that adoption in some parts of Africa had indeed become a business.
A Canadian adopted from Swaziland tells BBC Network Africa about her experience: I was born in 1987 in Mbabane General Hospital, Swaziland. My mother, who was a Mozambican refugee, left me there. My photograph was put into the Swazi Times newspaper, asking my family to collect me. If no one did then I would have had to go to an orphanage. But my adoptive parents were visiting my aunt, who I think was a nurse, in Swaziland and they heard about me. My mum said they knew they had to do something. It took them a month to finalise the adoption. I was premature, weighing 3lb 6 ounces and was so tiny my dad says I could fit in the crook of his elbow.
“I grew up in Canada, that’s the home that I know, and for a long time I was one of the only black children at school. When you are little, kids don’t notice. But as you grow up, you have questions about where you are from, especially when you realise that you look different.
“It’s got an element where adoption has now become commercialised. And so it’s an industry that some orphanages are benefiting (from)—and they are promoting adoption basically to be able to sustain and maintain the orphanages,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme.
He said large sums of money were sometimes being paid by prospective parents.”There was a lady who worked with the American embassy in Uganda and she mentioned the figures ranged between $10,000 to $30,000,” Mugawe said.
According to the ACPF, Ethiopia has more than 70 adoption agencies, including 15 that only refer children to families in the United States.
Most African children go to the US, which is where most adoptions from foreign countries occur—in 2010 more than 11,000 children from more than 100 countries were adopted by American parents.
International adoption is also popular in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Uganda, and Burkina Faso, the ACPF report says.
People wanting to adopt children are increasingly turning to Africa because changes in adoption patterns and laws in other countries have resulted in a shortage of adoptable children, it says.
According to international law, inter-country adoption should be a last resort— and the rise in the number of children being adopted in Africa and moved to other countries is of concern to child welfare experts.
“Every child has the right to be reared in the country and culture in which it was born,” said Mugawe. “It is true that a number of children have actually benefited from adoption, but is it the best option or have other options been explored?” he told the BBC.”
See the rest at Group faults rising trend in child adoption from Africa[Business Day Online.com 1/4/13 by Joshua Bassey]
Update 2: See a 33-page pdf of the conference report here.
Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let you know a few of the pictures aren’t loading properly. I’m not sure
why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different internet browsers and both show the same results.
Is it this post or posts older than March 2012? We need a several more months to load graphics into older posts as we migrated to this location in May. Posts prior to Jan 1, 2012 never had official graphics to begin with. We do add graphics for updates as those come up.