Why We Do Not Run an Orphanage

People sometimes ask when we are going to open a children's home. It is a fair question, because a home is the most visible thing a small organisation working with orphans and vulnerable children could build. We are not going to, and the reason is not money.

We are a Community Based Organisation registered in Kiambu County, and caring for orphans and vulnerable children is the first activity named on our certificate. This is how we read that responsibility, and why it points away from institutions and toward the households children are already in.

Where the evidence points

Research on institutional care for children has run for decades across many countries, and it is unusually consistent for social science. Children raised in institutions tend to do worse than children raised in families, and well run homes with committed staff still show the gap.

The comparison that matters is not a children's home against an ideal family. It is a home against the actual family a child would otherwise be in, which is often a poor one. Even there, the direction of the evidence holds.

We attach no figures to this deliberately. Numbers exist, but repeating a statistic we have not verified ourselves is the habit we criticise when we find it elsewhere. The direction is clear enough that a small organisation should not bet against it.

Kenya's own policy has moved the same way. Government direction in recent years has been toward family based and community based care, and away from reliance on residential institutions. We are not ahead of policy here. We are following it.

Most children in homes are not orphans

A large share of children living in children's homes have a living parent, and most have a relative who could be traced. This surprises people, and it is the most useful thing to understand about the question.

They are there because of poverty, illness, a family crisis, a disability nobody could manage alone, or fees that could not be found. Placement is usually a decision an adult made under pressure, believing the child would at least be fed and schooled. It is rarely abandonment.

That changes what the problem is. If a child is in an institution because their household collapsed financially, the answer is not a better institution. It is whatever would have kept that household standing.

Where a small budget goes furthest

Keeping a child at home is usually cheaper than housing them. A residential place carries the building, the staff, the food, the utilities and the compliance, every month, for years. Supporting a household carries the cost of the particular gap it could not close, which is often about school or food and often temporary.

We are not claiming a ratio. We have not costed one and we will not invent one. But the shape of those two budgets is plain to anyone who has looked at both.

It also means our work looks unremarkable. Fees, a uniform, food, a medical bill, help with an application, a visit to check that a grandmother is coping. None of it photographs well.

There is a limit, and we should say it plainly. Some children cannot stay where they are, because staying is not safe. That is a child protection matter, it belongs with the people who hold the legal mandate for it, and we would not take it on ourselves.

Why buildings are easier to fund

A building is fundable in a way a grandmother is not. It has a name, a foundation stone, a ribbon, a photograph and a completion date. A donor can stand in front of it. Twenty years later it is still there.

A few hundred shillings a month toward a household in Ruiru has none of that. Success looks like nothing happening: a child who stayed in school, a family that did not come apart, a crisis that never arrived.

We do not think donors who fund buildings are foolish, and we do not think people running children's homes are acting in bad faith. Most homes exist because somebody saw children in trouble and did the most obvious thing available. We feel that pull too.

We would rather raise less and spend it where it works. If that makes fundraising harder, it is a cost we carry rather than one we pass to a child.

What we do instead

We work with the household the child is already in. That means finding what is actually missing, which is usually smaller and more specific than people expect, then closing that gap and staying in contact long enough to know whether it held.

It means treating the caregiver as the person in charge rather than working around them, because they are the one still there after we leave. Often that caregiver is elderly, which is part of why the elderly are also named on our certificate.

And it means declining some things. We have been asked about starting a home, and we will keep saying no, because agreeing would mean choosing the easier fundraise over the better outcome for the child.

If you know a household in Ruiru where children are at risk of being sent away for reasons money or paperwork could solve, tell us. If you want to fund the unglamorous version of this work, the donate page has the details.