Real Family Preservation in Uganda

The following is why we do not like adoption agencies acting as family preservation organizations due to the inherent conflict of interest. Adoption agencies should not be the deciders of where a child goes. Additionally, orphanage child sponsorships continue to separate families. Instead, whole family sponsorships or child sponsorships in which children remain in the home are better options.

Campaign for Alternative Care in Uganda [International Child.org] website states the following:

“International Child Campaign is supporting and promoting Family Preservation, Resettlement and the Alternative Care Framework for Children without Parental Care in Uganda. Phase one of the Alternative Care Task Force Project was completed in May 2012 by the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development and other NGO partners. It designed, piloted and rolled out an Alternative Care Assessment Toolkit to district officers. The data collected in the pilot is the basis for creating a statistical benchmark of childcare institutions, policies and processes in Uganda.

Some observations to come from the pilot study:

Children are recruited [into orphanages] in line with a ‘vision’ rather than the needs of the community … There is very little will to resettle children when child sponsorship is involved … Most children in the institutions assessed have families … International adoption reduces efforts to find Ugandan solutions … Some institutions admitted that donors are not willing to fund [domestic] resettlement activities …

There has been a massive rise in the number of childcare institutions in Uganda since 1996, when there were 35 childcare institutions. Today there are more than 500, of which only 6 are run by the state. This means that charities and churches, mostly funded from abroad, are effectively running Uganda’s non-parental childcare system, and most are using residential care facilities (orphanages) as the main service provision, despite that fact that most of the children in orphanages do have families.

There are some inspirational initiatives to reunite children with their families, prevent separation in the first place and to build a domestic foster and adoption system. It is these initiatives that the campaign is promoting and supporting.”

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