Uganda: The Next Destination for Orphan Addicts

Today, Uganda makes a good case study for considering the effects of focusing on orphans as opposed to other vulnerable children, as recent trends there reflect well- established and problematic patterns in orphan care - from orphan tourism and the mushrooming of orphanages to infestation by a voracious and corrupt orphan industrial complex.

5.1 Abandonment, Institutionalization, and Adoption: The Ugandan Case

It is important to first note that Uganda has no significant history of institutional care. In 1992, after decades of civil war and at the height of the AIDS pandemic, only 2,900 children were in institutional care in Uganda (Williamson and Greenberg 2010, p. 7). Today, 14% of Uganda's 17.1 million children - or 2.43 million - have lost at least one parent to death, an increase from 11.5% in 2000. 45.6% of these children have lost their parent(s) to HIV/AIDS (Uganda Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development 2011, p. 4). Though this might easily be interpreted as an “orphan crisis” threatening to overwhelm traditional extended family care, about 90% of orphaned children are cared for in their families and communities (The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS 2009, p. 2). These facts both problematize the very notion of “orphan” as a salient local category and fail to explain trends in institutionalization: by 2009, the number of children in institutions had skyrocketed to 40,000, and in 2013, it had jumped to 50,000 (http://www.alternative-care-uganda.org/problem.html).

These numbers also seem disproportionate to what policymakers know about child abandonment in Uganda. While it is difficult to find reliable numbers, social workers estimate that about 100 children are abandoned annually, half in the capital city, Kampala. They are typically left at hospitals or in semipublic places such as bus depots or pit latrines, where they are likely to be found. However, social workers indicate that where they are able to reunify abandoned children with their families, poverty tends to have been an overriding consideration in abandon­ment (as well as an obstacle to reunification). They also surmise that child aban­donment is increasing due to a breakdown in the extended family structure that would otherwise support families and children. But there is a question of cause and effect here: according to social worker John Kasule, who has decades of experience working in babies' homes in Kampala,

People are positing that the reason kids go into homes is poverty, and they'll be better tended in the homes. But in actuality they're making them - and their families - more vulnerable... In a country like Uganda, children are a source of support for the family. They enhance the support because their parents are poor but they get support of the children, and then they can prosper...as one unit. But now when you pull out those children from there... the support you are giving the children far away from [their parents], the families are not benefiting from it.

Nevertheless, as orphanages spring up around the country, so do children to fill them. Though many people may assume that orphanages are being established to meet the increase in orphans due to child abandonment, it is more likely the other way around. Riley says, “If you look at the 50,000 kids we've got in institutional care in Uganda, the truth is most of them are there for education or because the orphanages are an attractive option for vulnerable families - rather than they need protection and care outside of their family structure.

5.2 Addicted to Orphans: Building the Orphan Industrial Complex

Kasule laments the misuse of the term “orphan” in Uganda; many children he has seen in orphanages are not in fact parentless. As with most children in institutions around the world, a Ugandan baseline study on the state of institutional care in 2012 estimated that 85% of children in institutional care have living, locatable relatives (Riley 2012). At the same time, less than 25% of care institutions have family tracing and reunification programs (http://unitingforchildren.org/2014/06/chang ing-lives-in-uganda/). Kasule, who has traced many relatives of children in his care and reunified institutionalized children with their families throughout his career, says, “The extended-family system is still working quite well... Why is the child protection system not drawing on that strength?”

The answer is that the orphan rescue discourse is more powerful, and adoption proponents more moneyed, than Uganda's child welfare system - and it is driving the establishment of orphanages along with the institutionalization of children, sometimes for the explicit purpose of international adoption. The number of childcare institutions increased from 212 in 2009 to over 600 in 2012 (Riley 2012). According to Riley, who helped draft Uganda's first Alternative Care Framework, by late 2013, the number of institutions had risen to over 800 - almost all of which are funded by foreign faith-based organizations. Only 30 of these institutions are licensed and recognized by the Ugandan government (http:// unitingforchildren.org/2014/06/changing-lives-in-uganda/).

Though external support is often assumed to be benevolent and unconditionally positive, it can obstruct local efforts to address an issue like orphanhood (Drah 2012, pp. 8-9). “There's a number of reasons why people would start an orphan­age,” Riley says. “One is, they actually care, but they just don't know what the right thing to do is.

Due to loose enforcement of regulations and the government's limited capability to oversee such rapid orphanage establishment, it is quite easy to open a childcare institution in Uganda - and with the reduction or suspension of international adoption in previously popular spots like Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the rate of international adoption in Uganda has soared. Uganda was not initially seen as an ideal candidate by the international adoption community, despite its supposed abundance of orphans: the Uganda Children Act of 1997 imposed a restrictive 3-year residency requirement for foreign adoptive parents (Government of Uganda 1997). However, when the US Embassy issued a visa for a Ugandan child under the legal guardianship of US citizens in 2007, the international adoption community discovered that applying for legal guardianship could act as a loophole that would allow them to bypass adoption laws. Legal guardians can take Ugandan children out of the country and then finalize adoption in their home countries, though technically, legal guardianships are still under Ugandan courts' jurisdiction. Legal guardianship is explicitly designated as a temporary arrange­ment not to be used as a means to adopt, but due to legal precedent (and, many surmise, financial incentive), Ugandan courts continue granting legal guardianship orders to foreigners knowing full well that they intend to take the children out of Uganda and file for adoption in their home countries. According to the US State Department, only 311 Ugandan children were adopted by US citizens from 1999 to 2010, but in 2011 alone, 207 Ugandan children were adopted by US citizens (http:// edition.cnn.com/2013/02/27/world/africa/wus-uganda-adoptions).

These numbers may still seem small in light of the purported “147 million” or more orphans in the world, but at approximately USD$40,000 per adoption, Ugandan institutions are now recognizing that international adoption is a highly lucrative business. Thus, evidence is already pointing to alarming irregularities similar to those of the Guatemalan adoption boom, including recruitment of chil­dren for international adoption, “child laundering” through altering and forgery of records (Smolin 2010), inducement of birth parents to relinquish children, and extortion of funds from prospective adoptive parents. And as in Ethiopia just a few years ago (Bunkers et al. 2012), Ugandan children are not only being handpicked for international adoption from institutions but from impoverished slums and villages where “scouts” are pressuring poor parents with little under­standing of formal adoption to give up their children - particularly the healthy infants and toddlers preferred by potential adoptive parents. This is often achieved by recruiters presenting adoption as educational sponsorship - and thus an oppor­tunity that no impoverished parent could turn down.

Uganda has not signed the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption - and indeed had not even approached the Hague Conference about the possibility until 2012 - so it could be some time before more safeguards are in place to protect against adoption irregularities. In the meantime, child protection and alternative care specialists are trying to close the legal guardianship loophole by calling for a moratorium, but certain key figures - including the Attorney General whose signature is needed for a proposed moratorium - have vested interests in keeping the adoption pipeline flowing (Namubiru 2013).

The orphan industrial complex in Uganda is further fueled by other successful international campaigns drawing attention to hardships suffered by Ugandan chil­dren. Most notable of these is Invisible Children, a campaign (also run by young US evangelicals) to help children affected by the civil war in northern Uganda. The organization was roundly criticized after the release of their video Kony 2012 for distorting the facts about the insurgency (which has not in fact directly targeted northern Uganda for years), but according to Riley:

The knock-on effect of the Invisible Children campaign is [that] we've seen hundreds and hundreds of children institutionalized because other organizations have thought, ‘Great! If we talk about the LRA and Kony and the war, that's a great way of raising funds!' So we now have organizations who've got children who have never been to the north of Uganda using Kony and the war in the north as a fundraising PR exercise...

An October 2012 op-ed in the national Daily Monitor newspaper calling for regulation of foreign adoption also refutes the story that war has led to the increase in adoptions: “...children from the Acholi sub region only contributed 9.6% of the adoption total between 2002 and 2007... All things considered, the essential motivating factor behind foreign adoptions seems to be money” (Agaba 2012).

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