Rapport over effect van buitenlanders die kinderhuizen bouwen in Ghana

‘The NGOs are breaking down our system’: Vulnerable children, NGOs, and the proliferation of orphanages in Ghana
door Afra Galama

Afria heeft een scriptie geschreven over de ”hulp”die westerse vrijwilligers en NGO’s verlenen aan Ghana en wat het effect daarvan is op de lokale situatie en het overheidsbeleid.
Ghana promoot de-institutionalisatie en door de werving van vrijwilligers voor de verschrikkelijke levensomstandigheden van veel Ghanese weeskinderen is Ghana niet altijd geholpen.

Een korte toelichting:
In Ghanaian Ewe culture, the extended family traditionally plays a significant role in the care for children. Orphans and vulnerable children are therefore ideally fostered by family members. However, the number of Ghanaian orphanages has tremendously increased over the last years – from 10 in 1996 to more than 140 in 2009 according to official statistics. This means an increasing number of Ghanaian children – many of them even with one or both parents alive – has ended up in these institutional care facilities. The situation around Ghanaian orphanages raises an important question. If orphans and vulnerable children are usually cared for in families, most children living in orphanages still have parents, and AIDS does not play a significant role in the area, then why has there been such a proliferation of orphanages in Ghana?

To study the position of orphans and orphanages in the Ghanaian context, Galama conducted three months of anthropological field research in the Volta Region of Ghana from February to April 2010. Her primary methods of data-collection consisted of (participant) observation, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with children living in the orphanages, their family members, staff members of orphanages and western volunteers. In addition, she studied and analysed websites of Ghanaian orphanages and of NGOs sending western volunteers to the orphanages.
 While a break-down of the extended family system in Ghana, an increased focus on the nuclear family, and poverty have been mentioned as reasons to send children into institutional care, it is evident that the interest of western NGOs and volunteers in Ghanaian orphans has played a major role in the recent proliferation of orphanages. For their sustenance, most orphanages depend almost solely on funds from western countries. Furthermore, the orphanages are used by NGOs to host western volunteers who are supposed to come and help the Ghanaian children.
Western NGOs involved in sending volunteers to the orphanages earn large amounts of money by demanding enormous fees from the volunteers who are participating in their programmes. While the NGOs need the orphanages in order to be able to send volunteers there, the orphanages hardly receive any percentage of this money. This does not mean that Ghanaians should be seen as powerless victims of the western ‘aid industry’. They are creative and use their contacts with western volunteers to gather enough money for their children and to sustain themselves. But the western NGOs are so powerful that they are able to keep this policy up without any consequences. They seem to have the greatest interest in establishing more orphanages.

Het hele rapport is te downloaden van onze website.
Het Better Care Network heeft contact opgenomen met de overheid van Ghana om toelichting te vragen en daarin is bevestigd dat nogal wat, ook vanuit Nederland ondersteunde weeshuizen, niet voldoen aan nationale standaarden en niet zijn erkend. Werk aan de winkel dus!
We krijgen hierop graag een reactie van mensen die Ghana goed kennen!

Download het hele rapport hier