Why Kenyans who can should consider fostering children

My colleagues and I have lately got considerably immersed in matters around fostering of children, thanks to memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed between our employer and St Martin CSA – a major NGO that– together with affiliate organisations - has sought to improve lives of vulnerable and marginalised people in Samburu, Laikipia, Baringo and Nyandarua counties since 1997. Previously, foster care was a distant and merely scholarly concept in our ‘ivory towers’ of academe.

So sad that we’re coming to understand the inner workings of ‘the world of living for others’ just as the Kenyan government moves to close over 1,000 privately owned charitable children’s institutions (CCIs) countrywide by 2032. The Care Reform Strategy for Children in Kenya, as this initiative is called, is a response to a much-debated global movement which holds that vulnerable children still thrive best in a home environment rather than under institutional care.

And that is true. Research has long proven that children who grow up confined by institutional rules within children’s homes never get to know how a proper family functions, and are unlikely to make adequate cognitive progress, or to grow into normal adults.

The movement to close children’s homes has gained considerable traction because of the numerous documented cases of child abuse, misuse of donor funds, and gross failure by some CCIs to give proper care to their charges.

Following dozens of hours spent interviewing cadres that included both parents and children in failed and successful foster care – all who proffered sometimes deeply personal and painful information with surprising candidness – and conversations with staff from CCIs and government children departments, I have gained some insights that, in my opinion, are helpful to both individuals, foster care stakeholders and the government.

First was the pleasant realisation that right inside our society best known for a dog-eat-dog variety of capitalism, political monomania, rapaciousness, corruption, abductions, assassinations and other markers of dark human nature, there exists a parallel universe of selfless souls and institutions, that have, at great cost, taken neglected and disenfranchised children under their care, giving them a second chance at life without expecting anything in return. But being not politicians, and blowing no trumpets ahead of their alms giving, such people do not make newspaper headlines. But they are probably the ‘salt of the earth’ that preserves the fabric of our nation.

A particularly touching story involved a foster father who was forced to single-handedly raise a salvaged boy after the spouse’s love for the child completely expired midway. Against unbelievable odds, this heroic Kenyan man cared for the boy until he finished school and college and was employed.

Equally inspiring were numerous experiences of other former glue-sniffing street urchins, who went ahead to graduate in various academic and vocational disciplines, thanks to benevolent families that patiently tolerated their journey to recovery. Several of them had even acquired university degrees.

Secondly, despite the international clamour to close children’s homes, the government should consider contextualised local interventions that retain some form of rescue centres. This way, rescued children, many of whom live with HIV and other disabilities, or have mentally challenged parents, or are survivors of existential threats such as gender-based violence, neglect, poverty, abandonment and human rights abuses within the family, can have a safe haven as they await placement with foster parents, or their own families.

It takes little imagination to see that a child hastily returned to the same family that she fled from in the first place will soon end up in the streets, or in a worse predicament.

The easiest way for the government to realise this, in my opinion, is to retain some existing CCIs that have a proven track record of professional management, probity with donor funds, adequate standard of living for the children and a culture of holding children only for short periods before re-integration into the society.

Indeed, those CCIs that already provide behaviour-correcting services to the children rescued from streets might prove to be particularly complementary to the government’s efforts at offering improved childcare. A further necessary caveat for such CCIs would be submission to proper supervision and audit by the government, and a binding pledge to work proactively towards reunification of children with their families.

Space cannot allow me to document all the eureka moments I had while researching foster care. However, at a personal level, the vanity of ‘owning the whole world’ - as the holy book calls unreasonable acquisitiveness - while other souls around me wallow in penury and desolation was greatly amplified.

It may be that I neither own expensive items such as an Sh80,000 ‘reversible belt’’ or Sh120,000-a-pair shoes, nor flash wrist watches worth millions as some political leaders higher up our food chain do. But my trip into the compassionate world of fostering still exposed my self-centeredness and changed the order of my priorities forever.

My final counsel to any interested parties is that the best time to foster a child is now, just before the curtain closes on children’s homes.