Since we opened our doors 18 months ago we have placed 53 children into families and proved that with good social work it is possible to place children into families. In fact the average stay at Malaika Babies Home is 4.9 months. This is a real achievement as research shows that any longer than 6 months in residential care can lead to long term psychological damage.
Our home was full and we needed to find families for children so we launched a mass media campaign to promote local adoption and it was a great success with over 100 Ugandan families contacting us and undergoing assessment.
Deciding on whether the families are suitable is a huge decision which we did not want to make alone so we established an adoption panel (first of it’s kind in Uganda) chaired by the Ministry of Gender to make the decision collectively.
The panel consists of representatives including Caroline Bankusha from the Kampala City Council Probation Service, Gad Mfitundinda Hashaka from the Police Child Protection and Family Unit, Rachael Arinaitwe, a lawyer from ANPPCAN Uganda. Mark Riley from the Ministry and Christina Sempebwa an adoptive parent.
The forth of our adoption panels took place this week, with panel members reviewing assessments carried out by our team of Social Workers. So far we have had 17 parents approved by the panel and as a result 15 children from Malaika have been adopted.
But it doesn’t stop there. As a result of our mass media campaign, our adoption panel and the fact that 54% of all our children are returned back to their families. (Which makes a lot of sense considering that 60% of children in care have families) we have empty beds.
We’re proving that children do not need to stay in long term residential care and it is possible to find them families so the next challenge we faced was working with the agencies who received the children so they would call on us to take the children into care.
Currently we have 6 empty beds so we decided to hold an open day for the Police who are the agency who receive most of the at risk, abandoned babies and children in Kampala.
Yesterday 18 members of the police child protection unit came to visit our home for the first time and we had a brilliant day.
They were very impressed with our carers and how happy the children were and saw for themselves how we go about finding families for children so fingers crossed that next time they receive a child under 2 years old who needs emergency care and protection we will be getting a call.
