Ugandan Street Children, Ethiopia Adoption and Mopping with the Tap Open

This article looks at the harsh life in Uganda and the growing trend of street children.

“A child is rented out to a near-stranger for about $10 a month with the promise that the child will be looked after while earning money from begging on Kampala’s streets to support the family.

The children are then passed to a guardian who looks after four or five children. The children dutifully hand their alms to the guardians in exchange for shelter and the occasional meager meal, though some are visibly malnourished and have been known to be abused if their daily sums are not deemed sufficient.

[AOL News 3/12/11]

The line from the above article that really is worth reflecting on is “”We are mopping while the tap is open,” said Mondo Kyateeka, acting commissioner of the ministry’s youth and children affairs.”

Uganda, like Ethiopia, has little infrastructure in its child welfare authority. Uganda is a place where adoption agencies are flocking to in the past few years as they have seen increasing issues arise in Ethiopia.

In a previous post , I mentioned 3 strawmen that are trotted out to justify adoptions in Ethiopia even though there are huge systemic issues: poverty, AIDs and how foster care is not cultural. There are 2 more that this article brings to mind.

1. Children will die if International Adoption is not an option.
2. By adopting a child from a country that has issues like street children, I am saving them from x, y, or z.

Both of these assertions make a large assumption: That somehow the international adoption system is connected to solving problems such as AIDs, poverty and street children. (The same arguments were trotted out with Haiti and how adopting somehow combats restaveks and with Nepal and penalties for women relinquishing children and trafficking issues.)

This assumption is flat-out wrong.

This goes back to the important question: Which children are being internationally adopted?

In Ethiopia, the children are coming from only a few southern areas and are being funneled through adoption agency-run orphanages. International Adoption does not even scratch the surface of solving the problem of the AIDS orphan because the internationl adoption system that is set up is wholly separate from the rest of the child welfare activities. The existence or nonexistence of International Adoption has no bearing on the countrywide outcome for kids. It is the existence or nonexistence of MONEY that has bearing on the countrywide outcome for kids. We, as rich Westerners, have the responsibility to ensure that the money is being used ethically to help support these people.

Street children rarely make it to the international adoption docket, either because they have family or they don’t have papers to show where they are from. Yes, they are huge targets for trafficking, but again this has nothing to do with the population of kids that international adoption will target.

International adoption proliferates in these countries because the governments allow adoption agencies to set up their own shops and regulate themselves. They have to do it this way because these countries do not have the infrastructure to support the scrutinization that complex international adoption requires. Support for and growth of the child welfare infrastructure is paramount!
So let’s make sure that the changes and review that are going on in Ethiopia result in something better than Mopping with the Tap Open.

REFORM Puzzle Piece