If the future of the world is with our children, then the future of our children lies with Africa.
Here’s why.
Population growth all but slid off the international policy dining table. For twenty years.
As we feast on the gains made toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, there has been a widespread assumption that the world’s population would flatline at 9 billion by 2050 (we’re currently at around the 7 billion mark).
Not anymore.
New research from Washington University¹ suggests that there is a very high likelihood – 70% – that the world’s population will continue to grow well past the 2050 milestone to 11 billion by 2100. The fastest growth is expected in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Africa is already home to 25% of all the world’s children. According to UNICEF, by 2100 Africa will be home to half of the world’s children and this assumes continuing relatively high levels of child mortality as well as a reduction in fertility rates as prosperity rises.
So if the future of the world is with our children, then the future of our children lies with Africa.
Within a context of continuing rapid population growth – the number of people in Africa will quadruple to 4 billion by 2100 – the family unit and traditional means of care and protection of children will be super-stressed. It is likely that we will see children increasingly left on their own and at a younger age for longer. The policy and fiscal reaction to this will see child care and protection move out of the intimacy of the family environment and into institutional facilities like orphanages.
Families are the most effective means of providing a child with love, which under pins mechanisms such as serve and return that deliver the vital stimulation for neurological development (brilliantly explained here in this 1 min and 42 second video from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child). Even well run orphanages cannot provide this essential kind of nurture. This means that a child’s development can be severely impaired in orphanage settings. But worse than this, orphanages are associated with high levels of violence, neglect and mortality.
Unless we act now to prevent it from happening we are in danger of seeing large numbers of children in Africa condemned to institutions and their lives destroyed, just as we have seen in Europe.
According to UNICEF some 1.1 million children are still held in institutional care across Europe. So against a back drop of continuing high population growth, it is more than likely that Africa’s children will be herded – in their millions – into orphanages.
But it doesn’t have to be like this.
Hope and Homes for Children has developed a model of working which gets at the root causes of separation of children from their families. When we commenced our programme in Romania, for example, some 105,000 children were confined to institutional care there. As a consequence of our work there are now less than 8,000.
This gives us confidence that we can actually prevent children ever seeing their lives destroyed by orphanages in Africa.
Orphanages are not as cost effective as providing the family support services that enable communities to care for and protect their children in a way that delivers much better outcomes for them.
What’s more the poor developmental, health, educational and well-being outcomes associated with institutional care actually feed population growth and exacerbate the problem. For example, there is an established link between poor educational outcomes and the number of children a girl or woman will have: 28% of all girls in Nigeria still do not complete their primary education and according to UNICEF Nigeria alone is projected to register 1 in 12 of all the world’s births by 2100.
Hope and Homes for Children has proven that investing in families and communities in Africa gives them a fighting chance to care for and protect their children in a way that delivers hope – not fear – for the future. And it can be life-saving.
I was recently in Sudan, where up to two babies are abandoned on the streets of Khartoum every day because of the stigma associated with being born outside of wedlock. The mortality rate of babies abandoned on the streets is catastrophic at over 60%. They die from sun stroke, from dogs eating their limbs. Previously these children were referred to orphanages like Maygoma where the mortality rate reached 70%. Hope and Homes for Children’s Emergency Alternative Family services – which place abandoned babies with trained, loving foster carers – have consistently delivered a mortality rate of less than 1%. Over the last five years we have saved the lives of more than 2,000 children.
These statistics represent real children. Remi, aged four, was rescued from Maygoma. She was paralysed in one arm from severe epilepsy and was unable to walk. In fact she was only able to move by taking most of her weight on her chest on the floor. We placed her with an amazing foster mother, Fatmata, and when I was in Sudan I met them both. Fatmata has loved Remi as her own and this has had a profound affect. Remi walks normally now, she can read and write. And she has a wonderful smile.
The cost of care in Maygoma is 2,200 Sudanese Pounds per child per month. This does not include the value of donations from charities or foreign missions of capital items like washing machines. Nor does it include the costs of senior staff or medical staff.
But the costs of orphanage care are not limited to the expensive effort of confining children. They continue to accrue long after a child is released. A child that has been institutionalised will find it harder to develop relationships, get a job and hold it down. They are more likely to suffer from health issues, turn to alcohol or drug abuse and with those come increasing health and policing costs. These are costs that are borne by the whole community.
Just project forward and imagine those human and financial costs in a continent anticipating continuing population growth.
Here’s the good news. It only costs 700 Sudanese Pounds per month to support a child in our Emergency Alternative Family service, less than one third of the costs of institutional care. And the outcomes are so much better.
The Government of Sudan has agreed to scale up nationally the prevention services we have pioneered and integrate them. In fact these services not only prevent abandonment, they provide a mechanism through which family planning advice and support can be delivered and help ensure that children, especially girls, can access education. These are some of the factors that will in time lead to a reduction in population growth.
This kind of family-based child care and protection reform, which saves lives and promotes the completion of education and improved health of children, must be reflected in the Post Millennium Development Goals agenda. In facing continued rapid population growth, African governments must actively orchestrate the policy environment in which family support services can flourish. They must allocate resources to them in the way that Sudan has and donor agencies must support them to achieve this sustainably.
This must start with a commitment across the whole of Africa to close orphanages and all forms of institutional care and replace them with alternative family-based care. Eradicating institutional care of children should be a universal policy commitment, backed by national budgets and integrated in the planning and strategies of government departments and civil society organisations alike. It needs to be a standing agenda item for the conference chatterati.
Over the last few months we ran our Numb3rs appeal: when children are treated as nothing more than a number – as they are in orphanages – bad things happen to them. We raised £2.1 million. This will be matched pound for pound by the UK Government’s Department for International Development to provide funding to enable us to roll out our work regionally in Africa. We will be seeking to provide the support to governments and civil society organisations to eradicate institutional care of children and strengthen the resilience of families to deal with the impact of issues like population growth.
So here’s a massive thank you to everyone who supported us with the appeal. You are helping to safe guard the future of the world through our work with children. Really, thank you.
¹Gerland, P., Raftery, A.E. [co-first authors]; Ševčíková , H., Li, N., Gu, D., Spoorenberg, T., Alkema, L., Fosdick, B.K., Chunn, J.L., Lalic, N., Bay, G., Buettner, T., Heilig, G.K. and Wilmoth, J. (2014). World Population Stabilization Unlikely This Century. Science 346:234-237
Mark Waddington 