Africa shifts to 'whole village' approach for orphans

The government has also upped its monetary support to families caring for orphans. Few organizations are building orphanages, and many aid workers here now refer to the word "institution" with disdain.

Barbara Hofmann knows all about this shift. A former financier from Italy, Ms. Hofmann started ASEM as a soup kitchen in 1991 – her own personal response to the flood of orphaned and abandoned children coming to Beira in the waning days of the war. During the 1990s, the organization grew to include orphanages, schools, and community centers.

But after years of trying to make more space for orphans, she says, now she and her staff are working to move youths out of their centers. Of the 400 or so orphans they housed a few years ago, barely 100 remain, and Hofmann expects that number to drop further.

"The government and UNICEF don't like children in institutions anymore," she explains. "They want to have children in communities."

In ASEM's headquarters, in a faded concrete building on a dingy street in downtown Beira, Jorge Tarquino works to do just this. He manages the ASEM office here, and sits in front of bookshelves full of binders, which are all overflowing with documents related to orphans they are trying to reintegrate into communities. Each page gives a name, an age, and a few details about the child.

"Felipe Xavier, born in 1990. Had been living with a grandfather. Wants to be a doctor," reads one of the thousands of pages.

"Reintegration – it's the biggest difficulty," Mr. Tarquino says.

In addition to locating relatives or willing neighbors to take in an orphan, it is his job to make sure those families have the means to care for the child.

ASEM has set up a slew of projects to help with this support – vocational training centers, counseling groups, food assistance. But it is not easy to monitor an orphan's situation in the community, Tarquino says. He tells a story of how a group of colleagues spent four days looking for a family to deliver two days' worth of food.

This is a challenge across southern Africa, aid workers say. The most effective way for a village or town to absorb orphans is for locals to decide how and when to do it. But with the AIDS pandemic, the traditional support structures in villages are falling apart. With greater poverty and fewer caregivers – the life expectancy rate in Mozambique is now around 37 years – communities need help, aid workers say.

But what's right for one community might not be best for another.

"The challenge is that it actually has got to be the community that does the organizing," says Annabel Kanabus, director of AVERT, an HIV/AIDS charity and information website based in Britain. "And that requires not only money, but it requires resources and people encouraging them to organize themselves – as opposed to people coming along and saying, 'This is how you take care of orphans in your community.'

"This takes a lot of time and effort. But it can also result in something better."

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