Thinking of supporting an child care institutions? Think again and here is why.

UBS Optimus Foundation's efforts to move money away from child care institutions into family-based care solutions

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The evidence is clear. The best place for children to grow up is in a family. Along with our inspiring partners, we can help you maximize your impact by pursuing alternatives to child care institutions. Rather than maintaining a broken system, philanthropy can act as a catalyst for positive long-term change. Change that keeps and brings children home.

The problem you're helping to address

Globally, between five and six million children are registered as living in child care institutions, but up to 80 percent have a living parent.1

Institutionalization creates unnecessary separation between children and their families, and is harmful to children, especially children under the age of five and children with disabilities.

Children in institutions experience slower physical growth, cognition, and ability to form attachment.2   And they are at greater risk of abuse.

Institutionalization is more expensive than family-based care.

Many children are placed in child care institutions due to family breakdown and poverty.3

A global issue

Reasons for children being in institutions vary across countries. 

  • China

    Since the relaxation of the One Child Policy abandonment in China is due to child disability and chronic illness.

  • Europe region

    14 percent of children in European institutions are placed due to abuse or neglect.

  • India

    90 percent of the 11 million ‘abandoned or orphaned’ children in India are girls.

  • Malawi

    Over 50 percent of children in Malawi are directly recruited by child finders.

  • Russia

    45 percent of children in Russian institutions have a disability.

  • Rwanda

    In Rwanda, 40 percent of children in orphanages are there due to poverty together with death or abandonment by parent.

  • Sierra Leone

    52 percent of children in institutions in Sierra Leone are there due to poverty.

Why are there still so many children living in child care institutions? 

There are three main challenges:

Lack of data mean that the actual number of children in institutions is unknown.

 

  • A 2020 Lancet study estimates that around 5.4 million children live in child care institutions. But the scale of the problem could be higher due to poor or no data in some parts of the world
  • Many countries have no visibility on how many private orphanages there are and where they are.

There is a lack of effective policy support for family-based care.

  • Child protection services are often underfunded and lack staff, effective performance management, and competency-based skills training
  • There is a lack of accountability and data to track outcomes for children in different care settings
  • Preventing children entering orphanages requires changes in behaviors, beliefs and incentives from funders, communities, governments and orphanage owners

Philanthropists and voluntourists lack awareness resulting in institutions perpetuated by charitable giving in low income countries.

 

  • At least USD 1 billion private funds given each year to well-intentioned ‘orphan narrative’ (UBS Optimus Foundation interviews)
  • Majority of children are not orphans and have family, many could go home with support, others could be in better forms of care (54 – 99 percent of children have family in 14 countries, sampled by UBS Optimus Foundation partner Lumos)
  • Institutions use children to raise funds through orphanage tourism, some even traffic children into orphanages to raise funds

Sharing solutions across Africa

We recently got to catch up with Lucy Buck, founder and CEO of Child’s i Foundation – a UBS Optimus Foundation partner. She talked to us about how the organization she set up a decade ago has evolved. And how their current initiative is demonstrating effective alternative care strategies, moving Uganda away from a cycle of orphanage reliance.

Here's what she had to say

“About a decade ago, I quit my job working as a television producer to build an orphanage in Uganda. My decision was the outgrowth of volunteering in baby orphanages there, seeing children who were not surviving. At the time, I thought the best thing to do was build a better orphanage.

A year into planning, I met an expert in child protection and development who talked to me about the research showing that orphanages were not a good option for children and that family-based care was best. But in Uganda at the time, there were very limited options for family-based care – the default was placing children in orphanages. So, we shifted gears to set up a transition orphanage for babies, which we opened in 2010. We invested in training Ugandan social workers to get children back into extended families. And we set up the Ugandans Adopt campaign on behalf of the government, for children who we couldn’t place back into families.

In 2015, I was invited to a regional workshop organized by Hope and Homes for Children (HHC). At the workshop I had a lightbulb moment: We were helping to place babies back in families. But it was a revolving door where we were helping children but not addressing the root cause of family separation. That was when we became partners with HHC, who is sharing their model of deinstitutionalization generated from over two decades of experience across more than 30 countries.

UBS Optimus Foundation is supporting us with our current initiative. We’ve realized through our work that you can’t just close an orphanage. You’ve got to build resilience of the family. You also have to build the child protection system. So what we’re doing now is working with two district authorities to showcase a model of family-based care and advocate for this model across Uganda.

We’re training social workers and volunteers to be the first line of defense in their communities, identifying vulnerable families and providing support so they don’t need to place their children in institutions. And for children who cannot safely live in extended families, we’re training foster families to provide family-based care. The orphanages? We’re repurposing them to provide community support services for children and families.

Collaboration is absolutely key to what we’re doing. No one can do this alone. It’s such a difficult field. You’re making life and death decisions about children’s lives every day. UBS Optimus Foundation has nurtured our collaboration with HHC and other aligned organizations. UBS Optimus Foundation funded the Transform Alliance Africa regional workshop, helping to bring organizations across nine African countries together last November to call for an end to orphanages.

The biggest problem is that people think it isn’t possible to have a system without orphanages. Our role is very much as a catalyst to show it is possible.”

Family-based care systems lead to improved outcomes for children

What

Preventing separation

Reuniting families

Alternative care

Why

Services in the community cost less than institutional care and can effectively prevent family separation.

 

Family reunification is a significant component of child protection, to improve children’s development outcomes and well-being.

Where family reunification is not possible, a viable alternative is for children to be fostered or adopted into family-based alternative care.

How

  • Social interventions to support families at risk of separation
  • Linking families to social protection schemes
  • Data systems to track vulnerable children
  • Strong gatekeeping: legal process and barriers to child acquisition
  • Emergency fostering to avoid immediate placement in an orphanage or child care institution

  • Providing families with information regarding conditions their child is in (often different to those they were told)
  • Case workers assessing and supporting families prior, during and after returning children
  • Data systems to track reunited children

  •  Supported kinship care
  • Network of experienced foster parents / families
  • Child well-being tracked and families supported by social workforce (including from transitioning former institution into family support hub)
  • Domestic adoption

Meet Flora

Baby Flora was abandoned at birth in Uganda. Several years ago, in all likelihood she would have ended up in an orphanage. But thanks to our partner Child’s i, she never had to live in an institution.
After a brief stay with her loving foster carer, three-month-old Flora found a forever home with mom Astrid. Flora is thriving. She is safe and loved in her new home. When asked about how her life has changed after adopting Flora, Astrid took a minute. She responded, “I cannot remember life before my daughter. My life has never been this full.”

We can help you maximize your philanthropy in the area of 'Families, not orphans' by contributing to sustainable models of family-based care.

Strategic focus area

Method

Target output

Demonstrate sustainable models of family based alternative care that can scale

  • Support long term policy reform in countries with high use of institutional care
  • Support non-profit partners to demonstrate replicable and scalable family-based care models
  • Scale up the availability of quality technical support for reform

  • # family-based care programs piloted with governments with scalable pathways
  • # technical partners available to advise and to scale up reform projects

Educate funders and voluntourists on the realities of funding care for vulnerable children

  • Support evidence-based advocacy
  • Support targeted advocacy campaigns and education events to reduce the demand for and supply of orphanage voluntourism
  • Invest in initiatives that drive coordination and partnerships for collective advocacy and evidence sharing

  • Volume and quality of Information and evidence created and available to governments, funders and travel industry
  • Volume and quality of advocacy for child centric care sector reforms
  • # outreach events and campaigns targeted at funders

Support scalable innovation in care systems

  • Explore feasibility of outcomes-based financing such as development impact bonds and public-private partnership delivery
  • Support the use of technology  to enhance child care worker effectiveness and accountability

  • # pilots of innovative technology
  • # pilots of new financing and delivery mechanisms

Collectively. For the long term.

It’s crucial to seek expert support from partners with experience in child protection who understand the local context.
Together with frontline partners, advocacy organizations and knowledge networks, we’re creating sustainable and innovative evidence-based models of family-based care.

Here are some of the partners you can support within our 'Families not orphans' portfolio.

Evidence-based advocacy

 

Increase in and effective use of funding

 

Implementation

 

Lumos helps international philanthropists, governments and communities redirect funds from orphanages to services that allow children to be raised in loving families. We’re supporting their efforts to generate evidence to understand the drivers of institutionalization and to influence funding and care reform.

Better Care Network is an international network of organizations committed to supporting children without adequate family care. We are supporting their Better Collaboration platform that brings together over 250 organizations to collaborate on knowledge sharing and development of an evidence agenda and a common narrative on care reform.

 

 

Transform, is a UBS-led collective impact program that brings together philanthropists who seek to invest in transforming the children's care system in the state of Maharashtra, India. Philanthropists will learn about child care systems and the process of implementing family-based care. Local organizations will implement the program that will be tested and then can be scaled to other Indian states and globally.

Our partners are working all over the world to create alternatives to institutional care and reform government policies so that families can stay together. Three of our partners are working toward this end in Africa:

  • Child’s i Foundation is working to transform Ugandan orphanages into family support centers, reintegrating children into loving homes. We’re supporting Child’s i’s work in three districts in Uganda to demonstrate that there is a viable alternative to orphanages.
  • Hope and Homes for Children works alongside governments and civil society organizations in over 30 countries to dismantle orphanage-based care systems. We are supporting their implementation work in Nepal, South Africa and Rwanda, as well as their advocacy efforts in Africa and Europe.
  • Railway Children Africa is working in five districts in Tanzania to reintegrate children from orphanages and the street with their families and provide intensive family support to ensure success, including therapeutic home visits, food baskets, school support, and medical care.