OPINION | Plan to end institutions for children by 2030: Good Intentions but wrong timing?
A national care reform strategy has been agreed on by representatives of government and civil society in order to stop and prevent the institutionalisation of children. It’s a plan based on South Africa’s prioritisation of family care for children. However, understanding the context in which deinstitutionalisation is being rolled out is essential to determine if its 2030 goal is in children’s best interests, writes Robyn Wolfson Vorster.
It is Christmas time, a time for family, a time when the eyes of the nation turn compassionately towards
those children spending the holiday in care, lavishing gifts and parties on them.
This Christmas could, however, herald a national end to institutional care. But, in a country with endemic poverty, gender-based violence and crumbling family support structures, could the timing of this strategy result in additional harm to the very
children it’s trying to protect?
In November 2025, representatives from government and civil society agreed a national care reform strategy and committed to a five-year plan to strengthen families, to prevent children from entering institutions in the first place, to remove
children already in institutional care, and to close 75% of child and youth care centres (CYCCs) by 2030, beginning with a moratorium on under threes being placed in care to be implemented by November 2026.
It’s a plan based on South Africa’s prioritisation of family care for children. However, understanding the context in which deinstitutionalisation is being rolled out is essential to determine if its 2030 goal is in children’s best interests.
Living below the poverty line
In 2025, newly released South African figures showed that although poverty has diminished in the 17 years between 2006 and 2023, almost 38% of the population still live below the lower bound poverty line of R1 300 per month. Of those, over
70% are under the age of 35, with children comprising more than 43% of all poor individuals.
In 2025 gender-based violence was declared a national disaster. About 42 000 women are raped annually and teen pregnancy rates rose to 90 000 in 2024, with the Department of Social Development (DSD) indicating that 18.2% of girls become mothers
before they turn 18.
Researchers continue to report the breakdown of the South African family support structure, beginning historically with migrant labour, HIV/Aids and urbanisation, poverty, violence, absent fathers, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022, about 2.8 million children were classified as single or double orphans.
These stats are indications that the country continues to battle pervasive upstream drivers of crisis pregnancies and child abuse.
Equally worrying, downstream, the alternative care system, a child’s right enshrined in the Constitution, is broken.
Detained
In the past four months, the Centre for Child Law has documented three cases of women who were effectively detained in Gauteng hospitals because they wanted to place their child into the child protection system.
In all three cases, the mother had legally signed consent to relinquish the child. In the case of mother A, a minor who was still at school, her mother also consented as per the Children’s Act, but hospital staff refused to discharge her unless she personally took the baby home. Herself a child, she experienced humiliation and huge emotional distress, trapped in the hospital and pressured to care for a baby she had already relinquished.
Mother B had the same experience at a different hospital in the province. Despite being unemployed and struggling to raise her three children, social workers and hospital staff tried to shame and coerce her into keeping her newborn, even threatening that her other children would be removed if she failed to comply.
Mother C, a student, abandoned by the baby’s father, was told at another provincial hospital that she could only be discharged when the social workers were able to place her child.
Despite the illegality of these actions, the cases are not isolated, and when mothers are allowed to leave, their babies are often left in hospitals for prolonged periods. One child protection organisation reported that at least 30 babies were
stuck in hospitals this year with limited stimulation, bonding or attachment opportunities because the DSD failed to collect them or authorise their placement in CYCCs.
At the same time, government responses to a question asked by the Head of the Portfolio Committee for Social Development indicated that in the first three months of 2025, the National Child Protection Register recorded 99 babies who had
survived abandonment. Given that the register is notoriously out of date, the number is likely much higher.
Adoption numbers dropping
The response also revealed that in 2024, adoption numbers in South Africa had dropped to a record low, a paltry 555. Only 37 of those adoptions occurred before the child turned one.
Additionally, following decades of trying to fix the foster care system to provide emergency care for children in need, the DSD announced in 2024 that there were still over 300 000 children in the foster care system, far too many to be adequately serviced by government which continues to have a dearth of social workers.
Last year there were only 15 433 social workers in government employ, 40 000 fewer than the 2030 target of the number needed to care for vulnerable South Africans including children.
It is against this backdrop that government, along with some strategic partners, announced that it plans to end institutionalisation of children in the next five years.
It’s a bold plan based on a global imperative being driven through the UN’s 2019 Resolution on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children, and the 2022 Kigali Declaration on Child Care and Protection Reform designed to promote family care, and as a caveat, end institutionalised care. It’s also based on sound theory. Academics universally note the negative impact on children of growing up in care, the consequential developmental deficits and how institutional care can result in many children failing to thrive.
In addition, in South Africa, family-based care is embedded in the country’s legislation and regulations. It’s widely supported whenever it’s safe and possible, as is family reunification when families have been temporarily disrupted and permanent
alternative care when primary family care is impossible.
Deinstitutionalisation is fully in keeping with the country’s core values for caring for vulnerable children.
So, it is interesting that despite the ethical problems of arguing that children should grow up in children’s homes rather than in families, the deinstitutionalisation policy document zero distributed at the November summit notes that “there is already resistance against deinstitutionalisation from several sections of South Africa”, and further that deinstitutionalisation is seen
as “more of a threat than an opportunity”.
Perhaps it is understandable that UK-based Hope and Homes, at the fulcrum of this initiative, should use such oppositional language for those questioning the plan.
Deinstitutionalisation has been rolled out in parts of the world with a history of organisations “recruiting” children into care to feed orphanage tourism or as a way of getting funding from the state or international donors. In those countries, most children reportedly have a safe family that they could return to, but they nonetheless end up in care because their families
are offered remuneration, persuaded that the child will have a better life in the institution or erroneously removed through the child protection system.
Denial of the problem
In South Africa conversely, if the practice exists, it is a rarity, and the need for alternative care for children is substantial.
Local pushback to the strategy has therefore not been because deinstitutionalisation is perceived as a threat, but because there is concern that despite extensive reviews of the economic and social factors pervasive in the country, the proponents of
the plan have failed to appreciate the extent and intransigent nature of the problems driving children into the child protection system, or to concede that alternative care options are limited.
Moreover, the DSD has historically failed to grasp the enormity of South Africa’s child protection crisis, or recognise that denial of a problem is not akin to solving it.
Truthfully, while family strengthening is essential for protecting children long term and keeping them out of institutional care, and a strategic priority that has been promoted by both government and parenting organisations such as the South African Parenting Programme Implementers Network (SAPPIN) for decades, it is fanciful to think that it is going to result in such massive and sustained social change that, within the next five years, children will no longer need to enter or remain in the child protection system.
And if it doesn’t, the burden will be on the already broken alternative care system to absorb those who cannot be accommodated in institutions, including neurodivergent children and those with physical disabilities who are disproportionately represented in current children’s homes.
Simply put, the deadlines proposed in the Care Reform summit outcomes document aren’t achievable.
The pending moratorium on under-threes is particularly alarming. To roll it out it in less than a year would require government to recruit, vet, screen and equip huge numbers of safety parents, it would need increased numbers of social workers to ensure that these children are properly cared for by the safety parents, it would necessitate urgent
efforts to fix the foster care system to allow for short term removals of children in danger and then for social workers to reunify them once interventions have made the family safe, and it would require government support for adoption to ensure
permanent placement of children who have been anonymously abandoned or consented for adoption.
Without that, the risk is that we end up with a repeat of Gauteng’s failed deinstitutionalisation pilot.
In 2023, when the first moratorium on under-threes entering care was being rolled out in Gauteng, a lack of alternative care options and communication about the plan to the SAPS and the child protection organisations tasked with placement of children resulted in the inadvertent recreation of the Christmas story, with abandoned and abused babies and toddlers being turned away from institutions that had been threatened with closure if they accepted them.
Tragically, these innocent children quite literally ended up with “no room at the inn”.
We still don’t know what happened to the affected children, but in a province still living in the shadow of the Life Esidimeni tragedy, the transition of children from admittedly imperfect but nonetheless, centralised, highly regulated, controlled care with qualified caregivers, safeguarding mechanisms and monitoring and evaluation, to non-existent or decentralised care which may be unsupervised because social workers are so overburdened, could have resulted in equally disastrous consequences, especially given its chaotic implementation.
Now, two years later, the national plan will hopefully be better co-ordinated, executed, and communicated. But with only a year until the first deadline, the question of how the model is going to cater for the numbers of under-threes in need of
care remains unanswered.
Forced to act as a gatekeeper
Failing radical changes in policy and practice, the only way to make this plan achievable in the time available is to act as a gatekeeper to children, preventing them from entering the child protection system even when it is legally permissible or
absolutely essential for their safety, as seen in Gauteng hospitals.
The upshot is that while projects in KwaZulu-Natal have shown that ending institutional care is both life-changing and attainable when properly implemented, it’s a lengthy and painstaking process. Shifting persistent socio-economic factors driving crisis pregnancies and child abuse, strengthening families, recruiting more social workers to safely reunify children and place those whose families cannot be traced in families, increasing adoption numbers and providing appropriate alternative care for children in the interim aren’t easily accomplished.
Completing it in five years, or only one for children under three, is improbable at best and at worst, perilous.
Robyn Wolfson Vorster is a child protection activist, and founder of For the Voiceless.
First published in News24 on the 24.12.2025. To quote, please cite Robyn Wolfson Vorster from For the Voiceless and that the article was first published in News24.