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.
Behind the photo ops and ceremonial handovers at the G20 Social Summit was a fierce battle that nearly saw children’s voices silenced once again. Children had to fight to get a seat at the table. They don’t want symbolic participation, they want real power to “shape our world”, but the problem, says Robyn Wolfson Vorster, is that adults don’t want children to speak truth to power.
The 2025 G20 Social Summit ended in an unprecedented manner for South Africa’s children when, on World Children’s Day, 14-year-old Amogelang Mashele read out the summit declaration and 7-year-old Jordan Motshegoa ceremonially handed it to the president.
But the triumph concealed the fierce battle behind the scenes to get children a seat at the table, and how close they came to once again having their voices silenced.
The children’s declaration drafted at the end of the G20 Social Summit’s pre-summit includes content from 70 children from across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya who attended the summit in person along with those who participated virtually or provided content to the delegates through the children’s social media platforms which they cleverly used to crowd source input from diverse groups of children cutting across age, race, class and gender. They, in turn, represent approximately 2.3 billion children, more than a quarter of the world’s population.
It begins: “We, the children of the Children20, are speaking together from different countries, languages and backgrounds. We ask G20 leaders to hear us. The choices you make today will shape our lives tomorrow. We want to help build the world we will grow up in. We are not too young to understand. We are not too young to lead. And we are not too young to be included.”
Delegates debated the five thematic areas designated for the Social Summit – specifically, digital inclusion and safeguarding, trade, climate justice, finance and achieving the sustainable development goals and 2030 agenda. While the resultant conclusions are plainly stated (the declaration was written so that a 10-year-old could understand it), the content is far from basic. To quote one of the teens at the G20 summit: “We chose to avoid the complex and ambiguous language used by adults when they want to avoid accountability.”
It’s a clarion call to action.
The children call for an end to fraud, corruption and waste, for more funding for child-centred projects, for climate justice, trade that protects child rights, safe online spaces and tech that helps children grow rather than putting them in danger, more effective education, support for children with special needs, combatting of hunger, child participation in policy changes around all spheres of life that affect children, strong safeguarding and honest accountability. Individually, they opposed xenophobic education policies, and identified the gender-based violence crisis, statutory rape and mental health as life-defining challenges.
Adding their lived experiences to the discussions, a teenage girl from rural South Africa described “the weight of danger online feeling heavier than my schoolbag”. A boy from Zimbabwe noted that hunger “steals your decisions before it steals your strength”.
They also asked for children to be equal partners in decision-making and a child representative in parliament, quite literally a seat at the table. The challenge to government leaders and even other sectors in civil society is, “nothing about us without us”. This is boldly encapsulated in declaration’s concluding paragraph: “We don’t want symbolic participation, we want real power to shape our world.”
And herein lies the problem, because while many in authority are comfortable with child participation in principle and mindful of the photo ops their presence brings, they are less willing to allow children to direct the process, to disrupt agendas, to fire adult facilitators, to find ways to include even the youngest children, and to speak truth to power.
It was exactly what they did. Children challenged the agenda of the pre-summit, requesting additional time to debate the themes and come up with solution-based statements. At the Social Summit, they questioned the relegation of their side events to the furthermost corner of the property, they insisted on including even the youngest children (who created the thematic posters that famously made it onto the stage during the declaration handover), and asked uncomfortable questions. For example, when told by an African Union representative that they had both rights and responsibilities, one of the children asked how they could learn responsibilities when adults consistently withhold agency and authority from them.
Authenticity, emotion, and genuineness
Respectful and mindful of protocol throughout, their approach was so clearly lacking in artifice and staidness that Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni quipped during the launch of the Unicef State of the World’s Children report after the final event, that during the handover of the declaration the children had “programme-directed themselves”. Which they had.
They ad-libbed some of the formalities, took selfies with the president, and when little Jordan was too shy to hand over the declaration to the president, it was the children who, much to the seeming delight of the president, took his hand and coached him in what to do.
Without trying, they added an authenticity, emotion and genuineness to what, as a civil society-led initiative, should never have become a stolid event. But it was this lack of decorum, the age and boldness of the participants that resulted in the most pushback from those in authority.
As one member of the children’s support team explained, even those tasked with forming policy on children’s behalf seem to find child-led dialogues and their voices confronting or uncomfortable.
And it was always going to be an uphill battle. Children20 had its genesis during the Brazil presidency on the G20 in 2024, but despite the recommendation for child participation, the Brazilians, who undoubtedly had their hands full institutionalising the voices of civil society in the G20 by means of the Social Summit, were not able to get it ratified. The upshot was that South Africa entered the G20 presidency cycle with the role of children uncertain.
Not only was the Children20 not recognised as a formal grouping in the Social Summit, but the Youth20, which is a formally ratified grouping, chose to produce a chairperson’s report this year rather than a formal declaration because, as group’s sherpa attested, they have yet to have any of their G20 recommendations implemented.
Nonetheless, the South African children’s sector (through the South African National Child Right’s Coalition, Unicef, Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Save the Children, Childline, Hold My Hand, DGMT and others) began lobbying for recognition of a formal children’s engagement group immediately after the handover. It was a request that was denied. Organisers were forced to proceed without it.
Despite its lack of a formal mandate, the sector began to mobilise children to provide input, forming a WhatsApp group amongst the children to get them talking, creating and distributing child-friendly content and planning for a pre-summit (amongst the many barriers to children’s input, the summit was scheduled for November in the middle of their exams).
‘The future is our voice. Our voice is now’
It was this pre-summit that produced the Children’s Declaration, but despite tireless efforts from the children’s sherpa and organising committee of Children20, children nonetheless entered into the Social Summit without a designation, with their contributions falling out of category.
The relegation of their engagements to the furthermost corner of the event, despite the gravitas of contributions from the AU, Sherpa of Y20, the Brave Movement and others, was proof of their uncertain status and organisers were fearful that they would end up being a side event as they had in Brazil.
Moreover, despite the conference organisers stating publicly that children would hand over the G20 Social Summit declaration, there was immense pushback, both from formally designated groups and from officials worried that the children may be embarrassing, wouldn’t understand or be able to answer questions, or be unable to acquit themselves well. It was a battle to the end.
It was why there wasn’t a dry eye amongst the adults in the Children20 team when the children handed over the summit declaration. Far from being a clever PR stunt, doffing a hat to the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, it was a triumph in the ongoing fight to get children seen and their voices heard.
Equally significant is news that the hope expressed by 16-year-old Sesona Qhimngqoshe, a member of the Children’s Parliament, will be fulfilled. She asked the G20 leaders to officially make Children20 part of the formal engagements in each G20 so that the children of South Africa can hand over to the children of the United States.
The children’s 2025 input has been officially recognised and they’ve been asked to submit their participation reports to the G20 sherpa. While uncertainty remains about how the United States will lead the 2026 G20, formal registration of the Children20 will occur prior to next year’s summit. The upshot is that children’s input will now be harder for those in authority to ignore.
To quote Sesona, it’s proof that for children “anything is possible if you put your mind to it”.
It’s fitting that the children should have the last word. The Children’s Declaration concludes: “Listen to us, work with us, build the future with us. The future is our voice. Our voice is now.” Are we listening?
Robyn Wolfson Vorster is a child protection advocate and founder of For the Voiceless.
First published in News24 on 28.11.2025. To cite, please attribute to Robyn Wolfson Vorster from For the Voiceless and note that the article was first published in News24.
It’s Christmas — a time for parties, presents and pity for those children spending the holidays in institutional care. It makes government’s plan for the mass deinstitutionalisation of children seem miraculous. But, instead, in an uncanny recreation of the first Christmas, it may leave many children out in the cold.
The resolution has a section dedicated to “children without parental care”. It states that children should grow up in a family environment, and that “every effort should be directed to enabling children to remain in or swiftly return to the care of their parents or, when appropriate, other close family members and that, where alternative care is necessary, family and community-based care should be promoted over placement in institutions”.
This was followed on 25 June 2022 by the Kigali Declaration on care and protection reform — signed by all Commonwealth countries, including South Africa — which “encourage development agencies by 2025 to prioritise quality care arrangements at the community level, over institutionalisation” and “support projects which take a holistic and inclusive approach to child protection systems development and family strengthening”.
While the move towards deinstitutionalisation seeks to uphold the rights of children, it’s also predicated on the belief that all institutions are inherently damaging, unnecessary and even self-serving. It’s a perspective obvious in global thinking about institutional care.
A study which focuses on “dispelling the orphan myth” illustrates that, while there are an estimated eight million children in institutions globally, 80% have a living parent.
Although the study did not include South Africa, it indicated that, across multiple countries, children were placed in institutional care due to poverty, disabilities, abuse or neglect, discrimination (for example, families that did not want to raise a girl) or because organisations were using nefarious means such as removal orders or recruitment to populate their institutions.
Equally, the Kigali Declaration argues that institutional care is being promoted by “well-meaning international aid, donations, orphanage volunteering, mission trips or tourist visits”. These, it says, “can lead to unnecessary family-child separation and undermine care reform efforts”.
For South Africa, the declarations represent an important commitment from government to move away from long-term institutional care for vulnerable children and have received widespread support.
Lack of nuance
As with many child-rights-focused initiatives in the country, though, the lack of nuance in the global view on institutions may be unhelpful in a South African context, and the application and implementation of the approach is proving challenging.
South Africa has no published figures about the number of children in alternative care, but in March 2022, the department of social development (DSD) reported to the parliamentary portfolio committee on social development that the country had 15,552 children in registered child and youth care centres (CYCCs). There were 3,337 children in temporary safe care and 912 in secure facilities for children with behavioural, emotional and psychological difficulties.
These statistics have not been disaggregated, so it’s difficult to tell how many of these children have been placed in CYCCs because of abuse and neglect; how many have living family members, and how many are abandoned or orphaned with no family options for care.
But, if the figures are accurate — which is doubtful because they do not include unregistered institutions — the number of children in institutional care is relatively low given the country’s ongoing challenges with orphaning and abandonment.
According to UCT’s Children Count, in 2020 there were 2.9 million orphans in South Africa. This includes children without a living biological mother, father or both parents, and is equivalent to 14% of all children in South Africa. A total of 531,000 were maternal orphans and 620,000 (3% of all children) were double orphans.
In Gauteng, the General Household survey from 2020/2021 recorded 154,000 children between the ages of 0 and 17 being orphaned, a significant increase from the 2019 figure of 78,000, bringing the total number of single or double orphans in the province to 566,000.
While there are no formal statistics to confirm the number of abandoned children in the country, the March report sent to the social development portfolio committee estimated that about 10,500 children had been abandoned across eight of the country’s nine provinces in the past decade (North West did not provide statistics).
The Minister of Social Development admitted that over a thousand children entered the child protection system through abandonment in a two-year period.
Significant numbers need protection
Although not all orphaned or abandoned children need alternative care, the figures indicate that significant numbers of children require care and protection.
This is reinforced by anecdotal evidence. Baby Savers SA reports receiving between 10 and 20 queries every working day from desperate, pregnant moms experiencing a crisis pregnancy, and inquiring about options for placing their children into the child protection system.
Further, despite the DSD stating that CYCCs across the country are 3,000 children under-capacity, in Gauteng, CYCCs testify that they’re turning away between five and 10 children a week.
In this context, preventing babies entering care and shortening the stay of older children in institutional care seems like a Christmas miracle; a response to concerns raised by child protection activists and CYCCs themselves over the past two decades about the length of time children are spending in care.
Factors identified as leading to children’s protracted stays in institutions include high numbers of anonymous abandonments, violence against children, abuse and neglect, anti-adoption sentiment, lack of documentation, interminable bureaucratic processes to obtain birth certificates for children, prolonged attempts to trace first families, lengthy processes to place adoptable children into families, the ongoing collapse of the foster care system and the limited number of social workers able to vet, screen and monitor temporary safe care and foster care parents.
The upshot is that support for women experiencing a crisis pregnancy, violence prevention programmes, increased efficiencies, additional social worker resources and an openness to permanency planning through adoption are an essential part of any plan to end institutional care.
Gauteng prototype
It’s too soon to tell if these components will be included in government’s eventual plan. But despite this, in Gauteng, the DSD has already fast-tracked the phasing out of institutional care for children in accordance with a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between the Gauteng DSD and Hope and Homes, a global organisation focused on deinstitutionalisation.
Although this MOU was first agreed in 2016, the Kigali Declaration has led to a flurry of activity towards ending the institutional care of children by the Gauteng DSD because the province has been identified as the prototype for the country.
In July 2022, just a month after the declaration was signed, Hope and Homes met with the CYCCs in Gauteng to inform them that all CYCCs would be closed by 2030. CYCCs were told that they can be repurposed in accordance with the established needs of communities derived through community mapping exercises and based on priorities and gaps the provincial DSD has identified in its planning.
Some suggestions made during the meeting about how CYCCs can “pivot”, are for them to become facilities for children aged 3-11 with oppositional defiant behaviours, day care centres, community outlets or step-down facilities for independent living which will be run by the DSD for children aged 11-21.
Only organisations that meet the DSD’s strategic priorities will continue to be funded.
When CYCCs raised concerns about changing the constitution of their NPO, about zoning permissions for their properties, donor requirements, and about managing the costs of running operations while also transforming their care environment for future requirements, they were told that they had the next five to eight years to review their operations model, repurpose existing buildings and change their funding streams, but that they would ultimately find the shift from “running an institution” more “rewarding in terms of children’s best interests”.
Supported by the DSD, Hope and Homes also declared an immediate moratorium on children aged 0-3 being placed in CYCCs, and reported that, as the bank of temporary safe care parents increases, children below the age of three currently in CYCCs could be moved too.
Hope and Homes will provide CYCCs with a tool to determine adoptability of those children currently in care. However, the goal will be to reunify children with families wherever possible.
Under the shadow of Life Esidimeni
No one disputes the dangers of long-term institutional care for children. But there are increasing concerns over the deinstitutionalisation strategy being employed in the province.
These focus on three key issues: Hope and Homes’ appreciation of the local South African child protection context and its complexities; the haphazard roll-out of the plan in the province, and the challenges and potential dangers of decentralised, potentially unsupervised care — especially in a province still living under the shadow of the Life Esidimeni tragedy.
Crucial to the disquiet is the question of why the DSD chose to work with a UK-based organisation to pioneer its plans for deinstitutionalisation, when it had local options available.
Initially, it didn’t. When Hope and Homes signed the MOU in 2016, it was in conjunction with Give a Child a Family Africa (GCF), an organisation based in KwaZulu-Natal that has had success across Africa with deinstitutionalisation and replacing institutional care with effective family-based care for children.
GCF believes that only a small percentage of children require long-term institutional care. However, it also recognises that deinstitutionalisation of children requires a serious commitment and a specific plan of action.
Following the signing of the MOU, it seconded its social worker to Hope and Homes for two years to help them understand the South African child protection challenges and develop a contextually relevant foster care programme.
However, when the contract ended after two years, it became clear that they had a different vision to Hope and Homes, who deemed GCF’s foster care strategy with its intensive vetting, recruiting and training regime, social worker involvement and support groups, too expensive.
Hope and Homes has run the programme without GCF since 2017.
While Hope and Homes has a wealth of experience running deinstitutionalisation strategies across the globe, there’s concern that it may not appreciate the complexity of the South African context.
During the CYCC briefing, Lourenza Foghill, national director of Hope and Homes for Children South Africa, appeared to diminish the challenge of abandoned babies without family care, claiming that Hope and Homes would be able to find the families of many “so-called abandoned babies” because it has experience using track and trace to do so.
She also intimated that the presence of CYCCs was encouraging desperate mothers to place their children into the child protection system rather than raising the child. She said there are currently “lots of people willing to help desperate mothers, which leads to mothers deciding that they can’t and won’t be able to care for their baby, which leads to the baby going to a CYCC and then being adopted”. This, she said, “is not optimal for Hope and Homes”.
In addition, although she recognised the impact of Covid on the recruitment of temporary safety parents, she didn’t acknowledge the current problems with the foster care system which have still not been solved more than a decade after the first court order instructing government to fix the overburdened and under-resourced system.
And despite referring to the availability of temporary safety parents to keep 0-3-year-olds out of institutions, as of July, Hope and Homes only had 18 parents in the “bank”.
Haphazard implementation
Equally concerning is the seemingly haphazard way that the programme is being implemented by the department. No written directives on the deinstitutionalisation process or requirements have been published, and government confessed that, despite instructing the CYCCs in July that they were not allowed to receive any more children aged 0-3, it failed to brief the child protection organisations (CPOs) that place children with them about the change in policy.
CPOs have unwittingly continued to bring 0-3-year-olds to CYCCs, forcing them to either ignore the moratorium or turn children away.
Moreover, it appears that whether intentionally or coincidentally, the DSD is making the re-registration of CYCCs very difficult. The upshot is that it is culling CYCCs even before it is ready to roll out its plan for deinstitutionalisation.
Factors precluding re-registration include DSD requests for health and safety certificates despite these not being required when there are no structural changes; for building plans despite some buildings being more than 100 years old, and for certification of competence for child and youth care workers from the South African Council for Social Service Professions (SACSSP), which are mandatory, but the SACSSP cannot issue certificates because of technical problems and the DSD won’t accept written confirmation of competence.
The result of these bureaucratic challenges is that some CYCCs will lose their registration long before alternative arrangements can be made for the children in their care. They will be forced to turn children in need away and, if the problems persist, children in their care will be removed because magistrates will not renew orders if the CYCC is not registered.
Others will have their children forcibly removed.
Care centre re-registration
In March 2022, a Gauteng CYCC was denied re-registration after the department introduced new requirements that had not been in place when it was originally registered in 2016. Unlike other CYCCs experiencing similar challenges who managed to get short-term re-registration while they raised money for architect fees and developing building plans, obtained health certificates in a pandemic or assisted the SACSSP to verify their staff training, this CYCC was given no grace period.
It was informed that its 10 children, aged three and under, would be removed and placed elsewhere.
In disbelief, caregivers packed everything for their children and watched while they were relocated to temporary safe care in Pretoria. For two months, they transported their care workers to Pretoria every day to maintain continuity of care for their children. Their nursery manager slept in a sleeping bag on the floor at the children’s new home to try to mitigate the trauma of the move.
By May, however, it became clear that they wouldn’t be re-registered and, for the sake of the children, they chose to withdraw.
They now face the dilemma of whether they should continue to employ their nine staff members whose salaries they still pay, despite not having any children in their care.
The story of Hannah
Notwithstanding their best efforts to minimise disruptions to the children, the nursery manager told the story of Hannah* who had been placed in the CYCC’s care at birth. At the age of three, she was moved from the only family she had known. As she arrived at her new “home”, she was greeted by her new house mother who asked her how she was.
The little girl looked at the nursery manager, then tensed up and threw herself face down on the ground. Recognising a trauma-induced “freeze” response, the nursery manager picked Hannah up, comforted her and helped her to deal with her distress.
A month later, Hannah’s best friend and “sister” was adopted and left the home, and a month after that, the nursery manager and her beloved “aunties” had to leave. Hannah, who is not adoptable because she has family with whom she cannot yet be reunited, will spend this Christmas in temporary safe care without the adults or friend who love her, and to whom she attached at birth.
Hannah’s story epitomises the damage that can be done without a proper deinstitutionalisation roll-out plan or way of ensuring continuity of care for all children.
Equally concerning is what has become of the 0-3-year-old children whose stories cannot be told, but who are already being turned away from CYCCs despite there being no alternative plan for their care.
Who’ll step in?
While an end to long-term institutional care is both a global priority that the South African government has endorsed — and an ethical imperative — important questions need to be asked about who will care for these children when institutions are gone.
How will we devolve quality care away from organisations but still ensure that there is proper recruiting, vetting, training and monitoring of their replacement carers?
How will we ensure that a professional foster care and temporary safe care system is not equally destructive, as has been experienced in other parts of the globe?
Although the UN resolution emphasises permanency, how will we provide permanency for vulnerable children in a country with a statistically verifiable problem with anonymous abandonment; more than half a million double orphans; the ongoing challenge of violence, neglect and abuse; an anti-adoption stance; an overburdened foster care system and too few social workers?
As the deinstitutionalisation plan is executed, many CYCCs will be forced to close their doors and dismiss their caregivers. Others will pivot and reinvent themselves in a desperate attempt to continue receiving government subsidies.
It is the children and their best interests that should be of primary concern.
As the spectre of Life Esidimeni continues to loom over Gauteng, the haphazard implementation of decentralised care without proper supervision and support is a terrifying prospect.
With our most vulnerable children at stake, we cannot afford to get this wrong. DM
* Name changed to protect her identity.
Hope and Homes was asked for comment for this article, but had not responded at the time of publishing.
After four years of debate and consultation around the Children’s Amendment Bill, it took only half an hour for the Social Development Portfolio Committee to decide on amendments. It was done without a clause-by-clause analysis, without reference to public contributions and with no input from opposition MPs who had walked out in protest.
The Social Development Portfolio Committee’s agreement to the Children’s Amendment Bill clauses should have been a cause for celebration for those advocating for vulnerable children.
A response to the North Gauteng High Court judgment ordering the Department of Social Development (DSD) to find a comprehensive legal solution to the country’s years-long foster care crisis, the amendments have been pending since 2011.
Eleven years and four court order extensions later, the DSD is only five months away from its latest deadline of November 2022.
But much of the process and content related to this bill has been flawed and dogged by controversy, and proceedings on 25 May 2022 reached a new low.
On the cusp of Child Protection Week, observers watched in mute horror as the committee chose to reject 136 clauses in the admittedly bloated bill, and then unilaterally agreed to the wording of the remaining 12 clauses in the time it took for the parliamentary legal adviser to read them out.
Despite four years of public consultation, national and provincial hearings, and over 1,000 submissions from civil society, there was no reference to public comment, or the needs of the orphaned, abandoned and abused children who the comprehensive legal solution was designed to protect.
There was no discussion about individual clauses, no proposed amendments or additions to wording, no questions about the new clause inserted by the parliamentary legal adviser and DSD on the morning of the meeting, and no debate, largely because the opposition had walked out in protest.
How did it go so wrong?
So, how did the process go so wrong, and what are the implications for vulnerable children whose best interests seem to have been lost in the decision-making?
Although it’s been a decade in the making, civil society argues that the comprehensive legal solution to foster care is relatively simple to achieve.
Orphaned and abandoned children in the care of family members need financial assistance without the largely unnecessary and unmanageable administrative burden of first placing them in foster care. The solution involves two key components:
Amending the Social Assistance Act to include provisions for the minister to action a new grant tailored for orphans in the care of relatives, the Child Support Grant (CSG) Top-Up; and
Amending key sections of the Children’s Act to specify which orphaned and abandoned children need care and protection, ensuring that the majority in the safe care of family members don’t need to be placed in the foster care system, and making it easier for relatives and unmarried fathers to legally care for them.
Although endorsed by Cabinet and experts in the department and civil society, the planned solution was initially implemented at glacial pace, necessitating multiple court extensions and forcing then-minister Bathabile Dlamini to admit, as part of the 2017 settlement order, that her failure to meet the court-imposed requirements was “unconstitutional, unlawful and invalid”.
The order of unconstitutionality was suspended along with the court order, on condition she prioritised achieving a comprehensive legal solution by the court-imposed deadline.
When Lindiwe Zulu took over as minister in 2019, she inherited the pending order of unconstitutionality against her as minister, a Social Assistance Amendment Bill that was gathering dust after being stalled by her predecessor, a Children’s Amendment Bill which had swollen to 148 clauses, and an ongoing crisis for hundreds of thousands of children made more vulnerable by the foster care system’s collapse.
But fortunately for the minister, the post-election Portfolio Committee for Social Development, under the guidance of then-chair Mondli Gungubele, took the problem seriously.
It passed the Social Assistance Amendment Bill in 2020 enabling the CSG Top-Up. This allowed Zulu to announce in her 2022/2023 budget speech that Treasury had allocated “R687-million in 2023/24 and R871-million in 2024/25” to implement the new grant.
With a quantum of R720 per month, roll-out for the CSG Top-Up began on 1 June 2022.
The only remaining task to achieve the comprehensive legal solution is therefore amending the Children’s Act to define which orphaned and abandoned children need care and protection, and to make it easier for relatives to care for them.
Biggest obstacle
Ironically though, the minister’s own department has created the biggest obstacle to completing it. The DSD inexplicably used the bill to amend the whole Children’s Act, rather than only focusing on changes needed for the solution.
When questioned about the size of the bill and why DSD had ignored the advice of civil society and the state law adviser to concentrate exclusively on the comprehensive legal solution, the bill’s drafter argued that for the solution to be “comprehensive”, it needed to focus on ways to prevent children from ending up in the foster care system.
It’s a valid point. But the version of the bill gazetted for comment in October 2018 contained clauses related to everything from genital mutilation to privacy to early childhood development (ECD), which no amount of argument could link to the crisis in foster care.
Nor did the department seem sure about what the comprehensive legal solution comprised.
The result was an enormous and controversial bill that necessitated four years of post-gazetting public consultation. And even after the ECD clauses were jettisoned because the department had failed to consult with the SA Local Government Association, and, more importantly, because ECD was becoming part of the basic education department (which the DSD must have known was imminent), there was such extensive feedback from national and provincial hearings that the resulting matrix — containing public input and the DSD’s responses — was so large that the current committee chairperson, Nonkosi Mvana, was reluctant to travel with it.
The upshot is that on 1 April 2022, the committee found itself in a virtual meeting, being guided through the 148-clause bill by parliamentary law adviser Nathi Mjenxane, who confessed to being so busy with other committees that he was seemingly unfamiliar with the bill and the matrix.
While on Zoom, MPs were required to flip between the principal act, the bill and the matrix, which was neither indexed nor organised by clause.
Significant errors
The complexity of the process resulted in significant errors, including Mjenxane missing 24 pages of public comment about the bill’s infamous privacy clause (clause 3, section 6(a) of the act) because, although the clause was at the beginning of the bill, public feedback was hidden on page 102 of the matrix.
As frustration built, the chairperson could have stopped the process and questioned if the committee would be able to get the bill approved, through the National Council of Provinces, passed, and regulations developed, by the November 2022 deadline.
If she had, MPs would probably have agreed that it was impossible, and made a joint decision to focus only on the clauses related to the comprehensive legal solution.
But instead, the ANC contingent of the committee acted unilaterally.
After Mjenxane had read the first clause, ANC chief whip, Dikgang Stock, formally moved that the committee should only focus on the foster care clauses.
Stock then gave blanket endorsement for all the amendments proposed by the DSD. If accepted, it would have resulted in all clauses in the bill being approved with the DSD’s preferred wording — without any discussion by the committee.
His motion was supported by ANC colleague Anastasia Motaung, but it wasn’t put to the committee for approval or voting. Instead, the proposal, which effectively rejected 136 clauses in the bill, occurred without comment.
Bizarrely, the meeting then continued as if nothing had happened.
Mjenxane ploughed on through the bill, either oblivious to the motion or in the mistaken belief that all 148 clauses related to the crisis in foster care.
Proceedings were only suspended when the MPs gave up trying to navigate through the cumbersome matrix and called for it to be grouped per clause and for future meetings to be in-person.
MPs went into the Easter recess unaware that a decision had been “taken” to summarily dismiss 90% of the bill. The first that many of the MPs knew about it was when they received the new matrix and discovered that it had been pared down to 12 clauses.
Choosing to focus only on the clauses related to the comprehensive legal solution was wise and what government had been advised to do in 2011. But the way it was done was problematic.
Unilaterally curtailed
The decision to drastically curtail the bill was taken abnormally and unilaterally by two MPs, and only endorsed by the whole committee weeks later after a new matrix and bill had already been developed by the DSD drafter.
Further, it appeared that there was political pressure on the committee to get the bill completed ahead of the DSD’s court deadline.
In her 4 May address to the committee, the minister validated the decision before the committee had even approved it.
In addition, the ANC MPs apparently gave no thought to what would happen to the other 136 clauses excluded from the revised bill, or to the four years of public consultation around those clauses. It fell to the opposition to ensure that they weren’t lost.
Ultimately, the committee approved the “foster care bill” approach, with the proviso that the remaining clauses become a committee bill. But if it hadn’t, it risked the clauses needing to be reapproved by Cabinet and put before a new committee who hadn’t been present during the extensive public input, and who would be lacking institutional knowledge of the bill.
Moreover, it resulted in what the state law adviser Lisa Naidoo, who from the outset had cautioned about extending the bill from its intended focus, somewhat euphemistically referred to as an “irregular process”.
The irregularity was immediately evident.
While all MPs eventually agreed that it was the right decision to only focus on the clauses related to the comprehensive legal solution, which of the 148 clauses comprised the solution remained unclear and contested. The DSD proposed 12 clauses, while the law advisers argued that only one clause was worth retaining.
Then, during lengthy debates on 18 May, opposition MPs requested the inclusion of the amended definition of an orphan, which had inexplicably been omitted despite orphans being the group most affected; exclusion of the revised definition of a caregiver which hadn’t been debated publicly but had significant consequences for orphans in the care of relatives; and the insertion of two clauses from the original bill that weren’t in the DSD’s version.
Missing clauses
The first missing clause was an amendment to section 21 aimed at strengthening unmarried fathers’ capacity to parent their children and thereby lessening the number of maternal orphans in need of alternative care.
The second was a consequential amendment to section 24 which the drafters had missed, needed to give the Children’s Court jurisdiction over guardianship, making it easier for guardianship orders to be issued to relatives caring for orphans.
Both are essential for the legal solution because they make it easier for orphaned and abandoned children to be cared for by extended family and unmarried fathers.
It was section 21 — the rights of unmarried fathers — that proved strangely controversial with the parliamentary and DSD law advisers and the ANC MPs, who insisted that further consultation was necessary.
It fell to IFP member Liezl van der Merwe to point out that extensive consultation had already occurred, and that apart from some small amendments to wording which the DSD had approved, there hadn’t been any public objections to the clause in the tabled bill other than from one father’s rights group that wanted section 21 removed entirely from the Children’s Act, along with the distinction between married and unmarried fathers.
The DA’s Alexandra Abrahams asked the chairperson to put the inclusion of section 21 to the vote, but the proposal was categorically refused.
Sections 21 and 24
However, the committee finally agreed to include the amendments to sections 21 and 24 along with the revised definitions in the new bill, prompting Stock to remark that he was glad the committee had come to the decision “by consensus” and not a vote.
When the clause-by-clause process was again suspended, MPs expected to reconvene the following week to approve the wording of the 12 clauses included by the legal advisers, the new definition, and the amendments to sections 21 and 24 as agreed by the committee.
Instead, at the meeting on 25 May, MPs were confronted by a new version of the bill which hadn’t been distributed to them prior to the meeting, as procedurally required.
The definition of an orphan was included and that of a caregiver excluded, per their decision the week before. But amendments to sections 21 and 24 were inexplicably missing.
When opposition MPs protested, Stock and Mvana inexplicably denied that the committee had decided to include the amendments to sections 21 and 24. The DSD legal adviser stated that the process had broken down the previous week, so the legal team had reverted to the original clauses.
Cherry picking
Moreover, the legal team disclosed that they had already met and unilaterally updated the 12 remaining clauses “to reflect public comment”, unashamedly cherry picking which input they agreed with, and then including it into the wording of the bill.
In so doing, they pre-empted the committee’s task of determining which amendments from the public and the DSD should be incorporated, excluding much of the public comment, and prioritising the version of the legal solution favoured by the DSD.
They had even inserted a previously unseen amendment to section 160 of the act under the guise of “public comment”, although there’s nothing in the matrix to justify it being a response to public input.
When Van der Merwe pointed out that the change to the definitions showed that the legal team had understood the committee’s decision to amend the bill, and questioned why the team had only implemented some of the agreed changes, opposition MPs called for a halt to proceedings while they consulted last week’s minutes for clarity (most had already seen the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) minutes which stated that there had been consensus to include amendments to sections 21 and 24).
The chairperson demurred that the committee secretary was off studying for exams and that the acting secretary wouldn’t be able to locate them. However, the chair instructed the acting secretary to find them after the meeting, because the committee would be “rescinding whatever we agreed in the first meeting”.
EFF MP Letitia Arries, who was attending virtually, then asked for a caucus, but was muted while proceedings continued.
Eventually, all opposition MPs walked out in protest.
Cameras were turned off in the meeting room, so virtual observers, including the PMG monitor, were unaware of their departure.
They only knew that Abrahams had left because she responded to the chair’s question about why members weren’t excusing themselves, saying she couldn’t continue until the verbatim minutes of the last meeting were presented before the committee.
If the ANC committee members had orchestrated things, they could not have done it better.
Someone contacted Motaung, the missing 11th committee member. She suddenly appeared on Zoom and, with the quorum secured, those remaining listened to Mjenxane read the legal team’s version of the bill.
Once he had finished, all ANC members agreed that they had debated the clauses enough, with the chair stating that they had begun debating the clauses when she was “two years old, and now she was six years old”.
No one remembered that only clause one, the definition section, had ever been debated in committee meetings. No one considered it noteworthy that the legal team had unilaterally changed the wording of the bill without a committee instruction. No one referred to the matrix to check if the public comments had been interrogated.
No one objected to the previously unseen amendment to section 160 or suggested that the committee reject the insertion because it hadn’t been for public consultation. Ironically, Stock even affirmed that “the proposed amendments… were not new amendments”.
Anxious about the quorum, Mjenxane contacted the committee secretary, Lindiwe Ntshabo (deemed uncontactable by the chair), to check on the number of committee members. He could be clearly heard by observers directing her that the minutes from the previous meeting must reflect that the process had broken down and no decisions had been taken.
In the absence of the opposition, the committee then rejected section 21 and the legal team’s version of the bill was approved.
Blanket approval
The committee’s blanket approval of the version of the bill presented by the legal team means that the minister will meet her court deadline. But what are the implications for vulnerable children, who weren’t mentioned once during the meeting?
According to Paula Proudlock from the Children’s Institute, the biggest problems with the revised bill are the last-minute amendment to section 160; the omission of changes to sections 21 and 24, and amendments to sections 150(1)(a) and 159.
Proudlock explains that if passed, the amendment to section 160 could force relatives caring for approximately 700,000 orphans to be assessed by a social worker before they can apply for the CSG Top-Up.
Not only would this hinder the comprehensive legal solution to the foster care crisis, but because of the lack of social workers, it could also make the CSG Top-Up impossible to implement.
The omission of amendments to section 21 is also problematic and, oddly, those who chose to exclude it seemed to know little about it.
They incorrectly argued that section 21 is about adoption (it’s about unmarried fathers), that the amendment is controversial (it was approved by Cabinet and widely accepted by children’s rights organisations), that it was proposed by Fathers for Justice (this group actually wanted it removed from the Act), and that it needed further consultation especially with the House of Traditional Leaders (there had been broad consultation and the DSD had agreed to the House of Traditional Leaders’ amendments).
Focusing on damages (which are already in section 21 of the Act), members missed the importance of providing legal recognition and certification for unmarried fathers living with maternal orphans, enabling them to protect and care for their children, and act as their legal guardian.
Guardianship cases
Equally concerning was the omission of the amendment to section 24.
Like the amendment to section 45, it enables jurisdiction for the Children’s Court to hear guardianship cases. This crucial part of the comprehensive legal solution allows relatives caring for orphaned and abandoned children to obtain guardianship without having to incur high court fees.
Oddly, the new bill includes the change to section 45, but not to section 24. Without this important consequential amendment, the bill contradicts itself.
Despite opposition MPs raising this concern, section 24 wasn’t discussed because the chairperson confused it with clause 24, which is part of the bill.
At the heart of the legal solution is section 150(1)(a). According to Proudlock, civil society has long advocated for a change to s150(1)(a) to ensure that orphans in the care of relatives aren’t automatically considered in need of state care and protection and are rather assisted with an accessible grant and supportive services.
But, despite numerous submissions from child rights organisations, the wording of 150(1)(a) contradicts the department’s own Child Care and Protection Policy, and CSG Top-Up policy. However, neither policy was discussed by the committee.
‘Band-Aid’ approach
Proudlock also cautions against the “Band-Aid” approach to the comprehensive legal solution evident in changes to section 159.
“This amendment will enable social workers to ask magistrates to extend foster care court orders that have already expired. This protects the social workers who cannot keep up with the extension backlog, but isn’t in children’s best interests.
“It removes the accountability that ensures children’s alternative care placements are regularly reviewed by social workers and the courts.”
She’s particularly concerned that this amendment will result in children in child and youth care centres languishing in residential care for many years without their placement orders being regularly appraised or family reunification services provided.
Furthermore, the amendment doesn’t protect children in foster care from losing their Foster Care Grants for the time that their court order is expired.
“While the grant can be paid retrospectively once the expired order is extended, many orphans will be without their grants for months or years while they await a social worker to process their extension,” she explains.
Events of 25 May show that the DSD, parliamentary law adviser and ANC MPs have lost sight of the goal of the bill.
It isn’t to technically comply with a court order or prevent further embarrassment for the minister — it’s to provide secure and sustainable financial support for orphans, and legal status for their related caregivers, without having to use the over-burdened foster care system.
The needs and rights of vulnerable children were subsumed by political expediency in the committee’s rush to approve the CAB clauses.
And in contrast to the indecent haste of 25th May, formal approval of the A-list of the bill has taken a month, once again delaying the process.
If the decisions made without due consideration are not revisited when the A-list is evaluated on the 22nd June, it will be hard for the committee to argue that it has acted in children’s best interests.DM
