ARLENE BROWN is worried about her children. “I have 52,” she says. The former nurse from Pennsylvania founded Urukundo Village, an orphanage, in the Rwandan hillside town of Muhanga in 2006. Half of the children live with her permanently. The rest are at boarding school or university. “I don’t want any of my children taken away,” says Ms Brown.
But they may be. More than half of Rwanda’s orphanages have closed since 2012, when the government decided they were doing more harm than good. There are 14 left, says Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), a British charity that is helping the government. A decade ago there were some 400.
Orphanages have proliferated in Africa in recent decades in response to war, disease and natural disasters. In Uganda the number of children in them jumped from 2,900 in 1992 to 50,000 in 2013. But their number seems to have peaked. In Ghana nearly 100 were closed between 2010 and 2015. The...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2xvMdq0
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