Africa shifts to 'whole village' approach for orphans

Orphanages in southern Africa are closing in favor of efforts to reintegrate children into communities.

By Stephanie Hanes | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 1, 2007 edition

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BEIRA, MOZAMBIQUE - The war was almost over when 4-year-old Jose Castello Valentima showed up at the orphanage a few miles outside of this port city. It was 1991. He knew his father had died. He hoped that someone would soon find his mother.

Mr. Valentima spent the next 14 years at the orphanage run by the Association for the Children of Mozambique (ASEM).

"I learned so many things," he says of the orphanage. "We were always studying, they were always teaching us." He pauses. "But in the family you get the best education."

Valentima is just one of millions of children in southern Africa who have lost parents to war, AIDS, and hunger. But he might be one of the last to spend his entire childhood in an orphanage.

In recent years, faced with an overwhelming number of orphans, governments and aid organizations have shifted their response away from orphanages and toward a system they call "community-based care." This means that rather than giving a child a place to live, aid groups try to support them in their own villages – paying for school fees, for instance, or helping adoptive families with food aid. Organizations such as UNICEF say this is healthier and more culturally appropriate than moving children into institutions.

But, while orphanages may have their drawbacks, community-based care brings its own challenges – children who cannot find relatives, neighbors too poor to care for others, villages too strapped to give the necessary attention or support to traumatized youths.

"Everything revolves around the community," says Thierry Delvigne-Jean, UNICEF's spokesman in Mozambique. "If we are to succeed in dealing with this increasing number of orphans, it's really at the community level that it's going to happen. But it will have challenges. We're talking about huge numbers."

Although exact numbers are hard to come by – the United Nations estimates that at least 12 million children in Africa have lost one or more parents to AIDS – there are millions of others whose parents have died from war and hunger.

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