Our aim is to put children into families.

When we started this project the only option for abandoned (“orphaned”) children was residential care but we have proved that placing those children in families was possible. In the 1990s, there were only 35 institutions and now there are over 800 with an estimated 50,000 children in care.

The solution to the ‘orphan crisis’ was to place children into orphanages. The problem is most of these children are not ‘orphans’ and in 80% of cases they have families, who, with support, could provide care for them. The difference between a child growing up in an orphanage and safely in a family is social work, good social work.

Child’s i Foundation is a social work organization and we are providing social work training to organisations across Uganda to enable them to safely transition children from care into families. We established an emergency care centre and we proved we could place abandoned children into families within five months of admission to avoid long-term psychological damage.

We set up a social work department who successfully resettled 70% of children back into their extended families and placed the children whose families we couldn’t trace into new adoptive families or long-term foster families.

We make families and the process continues everyday for each child that comes into our care. This is how we do it: