Aid directly to families a cheaper option than orphanages

MCHINJI DISTRICT, Malawi — The Home of Hope orphanage provides Chikodano Lupanga, 15, with three nutritious meals a day, new school uniforms, sensible black shoes and a decent education.

Her orphaned cousin Jean, 11, who balked at entering the orphanage and lives with her grown sister, has no shoes, raggedy clothes and an often-empty belly. Repeating third grade for the third time, Jean said she bitterly regretted she did not grow up in the orphanage where Madonna adopted a boy. Had she stayed, she whispered, "I would have learned to read."

In a country as poor as Malawi, children placed in institutions are often seen as the lucky ones. But even as orphanages have sprung up across Africa with donations from Western churches and charities, the families who care for most of the continent's orphans have gotten no help at all, household surveys show.

Researchers say a far better way to assist these bereft children is with simple allocations of cash — $4 to $20 a month in an experimental program under way in Malawi — given directly to the destitute extended families who take them in.

That program could provide grants to eight families looking after some 24 children for the $1,500 a year it costs to sponsor one child at the Home of Hope, estimated Candace Miller, a Boston University professor and a lead researcher in the project.

Experts and child advocates maintain that orphanages are expensive and often harm children's development by separating them from their families.

Most of the children living in institutions around the world have a surviving parent or close relative, and they most commonly entered orphanages because of poverty, according to new reports by UNICEF and Save the Children.

"Because there's money in orphanages, people are creating them and getting children in them," said Dr. Biziwick Mwale, executive director of Malawi's National AIDS Commission.

Families who have been collecting the grants for a year or two said they have made a difference. Velenasi Jackson spends the $20 she gets each month on staple foods and clothes for the 10 orphaned grandchildren who share her two-room mud hut in the village of Nyoka. They no longer go whole days with nothing to eat, she said.

The Home of Hope's founder, the Rev. Thomson Chipeta, 80, said children needed the orphanage because their families were so poor. "If the children can be given the privilege of a home like this one, it's much better," he said.

Madonna's charity, Raising Malawi, pays for most of Home of Hope's operating budget and supports community centers where orphans who remain with their families can go for food and services, said the charity's executive director, Philippe van den Bossche. He said orphanages were not the best solution but were needed when families could not or would not care for children.

But across Africa, demographic data show that even the poorest extended families usually take in children whose parents have died.

The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS, which brought together international experts to review hundreds of studies, this year endorsed programs that give the poorest families financial support, including cash-transfer programs like Malawi's.