Poverty is a major reason for children ending up in care and especially for them ending up in institutions, as we have seen in various blogs (HERE and HERE). So combating poverty is an important part of ending institutionalisation. However, this does not mean that we have to put an end to poverty world-wide in order to prevent children from ending up in institutions.
Recently I was interacting with people who had a real interest in the subject of deinstitutionalisation, but who did not have an in-depth understanding of all that is involved in it yet. They quickly understood that poverty was one of the main reasons for institutionalisation in the areas they were working in, but this realisation made them lose hope. Because, they said, how can we possibly put an end to poverty? This is a very valid reaction. And it made me realise that this is a subject important to address in a blog.
I want to share with you what I told them: Putting an end to poverty is indeed an enormous task that is not really possible in the short term. Thankfully when we are talking about making sure poverty is not a reason for taking children into institutions, we do not need to go all the way to eradicating poverty completely. Rather we need to help create awareness and support that will improve the situation of the poorest people enough to help them be able to raise their own children.
The starting point is creating awareness that removing a child from a poor family to place him or her in an institution does not in fact provide the kind of wonderful life that people imagine. In many cases children are not put in institutions because their parents really are not able to care for them or feed them, but because there is a general belief that the child will have better chances if placed in an institution.
Next you either need to raise awareness with the people who need them of different forms of family strengthening support that already exist. These could include things like access to free education and healthcare (or help with the cost of it) and help with finding/starting income generating activities or providing cash transfers. Or if these things do not exist yet, work needs to be done to develop them.
Advocacy and a communication strategy may be needed to develop these things if they do not yet exist, because the first objection will be ‘we cannot afford to do that’, when in fact these things are much, much cheaper than funding the care for a child in an institution, while being much more beneficial to the children. Many very poor countries have found in the past decade that the money put into combating poverty and family strengthening are very worthwhile investments.
So again, this is not about putting an end to poverty once and for all. Instead it is helping to create conditions that allow parents to care for their own children. Even if they may have fewer clothes or fewer toys in their own family than in an institution, their chances in life will still be much better if they grow up in their family.
This also raises the importance of understanding ‘good enough parental care’. While children may not be in perfect or ideal circumstances in their family – because of poverty or other issues – this does not necessarily mean that they would be better off being taken away from their family and raised somewhere else. Unless a child is actually in danger or at very serious risk in their family, they are usually better off staying there.
Please share this blog to help raise awareness.
