Giving Compass' Take:

• The author examines the role of family and community care for orphans in Africa once they shut down the orphanages. This practice puts a burden on women who inevitably end up taking in extra children to care for. 

• Can women who are taking in the children work together to form networks that help each other with the influx of children--perhaps start some sort of daycare system?

• Read about Lumos, JK Rowling's charity that tries to help orphans leave unsafe orphanages. 

Volunteering in orphanages used to be a rite of passage for young, wealthy people from the Western world who wanted to “do good” in Africa, while celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie famously adopted African orphans from institutions. But now, public opinion is turning against institutionalized care for orphans, as NGOs and governments shift focus to family and community care.

That’s partially because many “orphans” in institutions are not orphans at all. A widely used, but hard to verify, statistic says that 80 percent of children in orphanages worldwide still have a living parent.

A 2014 study by UNICEF and the Kenyan government showed that institutional care has a negative impact on the social, emotional, cognitive and intellectual development of the 2.4 million orphans in the country, 30-45 percent of whom end up in charitable institutions.

Rwanda has led the charge in transitioning from institutional to foster care.  The Kenyan government is considering following Rwanda’s example and closing its orphanages. But the movement away from institutional care has implications for the already disproportionate burden of unpaid care shouldered by women in many countries.

When a child is put into community care, either with their own family or a foster family, the job of raising the child inevitably falls to women and it comes with an extra cost.

Megan Wright, the founder and director of Tushinde, says she started the organization after she noticed that the majority of the cases of families in crisis are of women who are left with the task of bringing up children if a husband leaves or a relative dies. Through its family support program, Tushinde now supports women who have taken on the care of orphans and abandoned children by paying school fees for the children,  and providing business training and giving grants.

Read the full article about raising orphans by Dominic Kirui at News Deeply