OAfrica

Almost 20 years ago I founded OAfrica to solve the issue of unnecessary and inappropriate institutionalization of babies and children in Ghana, an issue that is absolutely solvable, now, using the prize money and the platform that wining the Elevate Prize will give us. I believe that our long term and culturally sensitive work, with local ownership has taken us from a situation of violent and normalized disregard for the rights of children to a situation where the country can manage its own care systems moving forward as outlined in the Convention of the Rights of the Child.  

OAfrica was created to protect the rights of abandoned children who end up in illegal orphanages in Ghana and spread awareness about the danger of orphanages which are often hubs for child trafficking.

We have come a long way in partnership with the Government of Ghana and UNICEF in getting 80 orphanages closed down and creating a legal and political environment for protecting abandoned children.

The prize would create the conditions for a “final push”.

My childhood was disrupted at age 4 when my dad left us, and my mother put me up for foster care. When my mum recovered some financial stability, she was able to take me back because of the “open” nature of the fostering agreement.

From the age of 22, I was a foster carer myself, taking in children for short stays. It was clear to me that contact with the birth family focused on the option of returning home once it is safe to do so, is vital for all children. Fostering should not be a one-way street. 

In 2002 I went to volunteer in an orphanage in Ghana and what I saw broke my heart. The care system was entirely dependent on unregistered and uncompliant orphanages, Children disappeared. Family members divided because of poverty were lost to each other forever. I then created OAfrica which empowers vulnerable children and young people whose rights have been compromised due to institutionalization, by reintegrating them into safe, stable and loving environments. OAfrica is committed to Care Reform and to ensuring that children grow up in safe, permanent family settings with appropriate care and protection and with equal rights and opportunities.

In Ghana, if you are poor, you have no social safety net. Poor parents are often enticed to abandon their children to well-funded orphanages. Orphanages actively recruit for children from poor families by offering better access to food, medical care and education. Often money changes hands. Many of these children never see their families again.  

The scale of the problem is shocking: according to the government data published in 2021*, 60% of children currently in orphanages have parents and could be reunited if their families were financially supported.

OAfrica believes children should grow up in families and that poverty is not a reason for separating children from their families. We created and supported the development of Care Reform for the Government targeting closure of sub-standard and unregistered institutions with concrete milestones and timeframes. The roadmap has realistic plans for placement of the children. We work mainly on tracing of families and reintegration of children, and economic family strengthening. 

In 2002 there were no trained foster parents. Now there are 544. 

Our ultimate aim is to ensure that Ghana has a working family-based care system for abandoned and out-of-home children, that operates in the best interest of the child.

*https://www.unicef.org/ghana/r...

We realized that we had to make the government and people of Ghana lead change. For that we had to win hearts and minds. We did not have a swarm of child orphans with nowhere to live and yet Ghanaians, despite having a resilient and widespread extended family system, believed in a “need” for orphanages, even illegal ones.

In 2006 we created a never seen before public-private partnership for Care Reform with UNICEF and the Government. Through our census, we discovered that over 140 orphanages were illegal and that 80% of institutionalized “orphans” actually had parents and families.

We worked hard to spread awareness about the real situation through media and advocacy, partnering with the famous undercover journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas*. We supported Anas to go undercover in three different orphanages between 2009/19 and give graphic evidence of the child abuse there.

In 2014 my book “Who Knows Tomorrow”* revealed a whistleblower from the USA Embassy explaining the link between child trafficking, adoption and orphanages and revealing how the USA was unwittingly fuelling the baby trade. On publication the USA announced a major grant to finish roll out of care reform in Ghana.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 

**https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22579194-who-knows-tomorrow

We have changed the way Ghana cares for its orphans and abandoned children, out-of-home children and children in need of alternative care and protection. 

When we started work Ghana relied entirely on an orphanage care model. There have been cases of orphanages with no staff where the children care for themselves; where they fast three times a week because there is no food; where they work for hours on the farm before school; cases of known child abusers allowed to reside on orphanage premises; residents gang-raped by others; female inmates forced to give birth so the owners could sell their babies; atrocious neglect of children with disabilities…these things happen every day.

Now Ghana offers preventive family strengthening, tracing and resettlement services by social workers and trained foster care. Ghana has signed the Hauge Convention on International Adoption. Over the last few years, a number of new protocols regulating all aspects of care have been published.

What remains to be done is to roll out the protocols and trace and resettle the remaining 3600 children still in orphanages. The almost two decades of work OAfrica has been doing has lead us to this moment which the prize can make a reality.

Worldwide, Covid-19 has triggered a funding crisis for all NGOs not directly associated with Covid-19 and OAfrica is not an exception. One year after the outbreak of the pandemic, we are still impacted, and we have adapted to this crisis. Instead of putting on hold our core programs, we have temporally reduced the number of our direct beneficiaries to approximately 100 extremely vulnerable children and youth, as well as their families, who are supported on a day-to-day basis, and we have started a transition to a project-based funding organization to be more sustainable and grow our beneficiaries and activities’ impact safely. Our goal in one year is to bring the Care Reform Initiative to a successful conclusion and reintegrate the 3,530 children still in orphanages into family-based care. Institutionalized children lose about 1 month of linear growth for every 2–3 months in care and they are more likely to become vulnerable youth and to be excluded by society. Furthermore, institutionalization increases their exposure to violence and trafficking. Ghana has 139 residential homes and about 60% of these do not have a valid licence. We need to act fast and resettle these children before it is too late.

OAfrica is committed to creating a world in which all children grow up safely in permanent family settings with appropriate care and protection and with all equal rights and opportunities. To accomplish this, we implement the following core programs:

• Family Support Services - we reunify children with their families, and then support those families through financial, educational and health services. In the last 5 years, 305 at-risk children were traced and reunified with their families and families were supported in their endeavour to lead a self-sufficient life.
• Foster Family Care - in cases where it is not possible to reunite children with their families, we place them in foster family placements headed by professionally trained caregivers.
• Young Adult Support Services - we provide support to vulnerable youth who are transitioning out of care and into adulthood through financial and educational assistance, counselling, life skills training and income-generating activities. More than 700 youth successfully exited the program and started an independent life.
• Care Reform and Advocacy - we promote Family Care, collaborate with Government & Children Agencies, and advocate for children's rights. Over the years, 83 illegal orphanages have been closed and our advocacy program has reached millions of people.

Our goal as OAfrica in the next year is to bring the Care Reform Initiative to a successful conclusion, to enhance the capacity of the Department of Social Welfare in Ghana to offer better care options to orphans and vulnerable children, with an emphasis on de-institutionalization. Institutions are often established with good intentions, in the belief that this is the best way to look after children. However, evidence demonstrates that family and community-based forms of care better meet the needs of children. We now have worked with the government for 15 years on closing orphanages and creating a system based on tracing and reunification family, strengthening family and family based foster care. The rules and regulations have been written and endorsed, and the Launch of National Standard Documents took place on 3rd May 2019.  There are approx. 90 orphanages that have been identified for closure and over 500 foster parents that have been trained.  We just need the funds to urgently work on these cases to resettle them before it is too late. We need to prevent further damage being done to these children through institutionalization. Research and practice over sixty years demonstrate the harmful effects of institutionalization upon children.

This is an extremely important aspect to us, as changing hearts and minds is vital to the process of moving children from harmful institutions and back into their families and communities. The 2020 data indicates that 2 in 3 children living in orphanages in Ghana today have living family. The media campaigns Elevate would support us to build would not only be directed at the Ghanaian public, but also and principally to the USA audience as the vast majority of children in institutions in Ghana today are supported by funds from USA faith-based organizations, who mistakenly believe they are helping children. It is vital to educate this enormously giving audience so that they and others in the donor communities support family’s strengthening programs and not programs that lead to family disintegration. These campaigns, discrediting “orphan farms” as private orphanages are often known, would make a massive positive difference in stopping unnecessary institutionalization and family separation in all developing nations, not just Ghana, potentially affecting many millions of institutionalized children. When you factor in the fact that orphanages are often a gateway to child trafficking, the importance of these campaigns cannot be overstated.

The Ghana board is 4/5 non-Caucasian and Ghanaian. The Ghana board has complete control over the actual activities in Ghana, as Ghana is the only place we have activities (the rest are fundraising boards) so even though every board member’s vote has equal weight, in reality the majority of the real decision-making power is in the hands of Ghanaians. Currently, our boards contain 11 men and 13 women, of these, 8 are people of colour. However, we are starting a board recruitment campaign to increase the number of people of colour in our other country boards so we reach at least 60% globally. Our boards contain people from over 10 countries and three ethnic groups.

My life experience as a foster child and foster mother taught me the importance of family, how love always finds a way and the importance of accepting change and dealing with transitions. 

I think that is also where I got my sense of urgency from, convinced that the child cannot wait. 
 
My life experience has demonstrated the importance of communication, and the power of resilience. 

I believe we can all be someone in the life of children and in using what the culture has that is positive, and building new, decentralized, and de-colonized models from that. 
 
As West Africa is a collective culture, we use family meetings, group talks and other culturally appropriate tools much as they have been used for generations but in the context of social work. 
 
I believe that the extended family system that made this country so resilient to the HIV epidemic, is the biggest ally in our work, and possibly West African’s biggest contribution to global welfare.
 
As a team, we have such rich and diverse backgrounds – social workers, psychologists, project, finance, and communication specialists - that we are fortunate to be able to support each other to get the true bird's eye view. 

When Covid hit, it was immediately clear to me that OAfrica could not survive. Our main income sources are Italy, Spain, and France, all hit hard. I had to think quickly. People were dying, the streets were empty, panic gripped. The last thing people were going to do was give to Africa.

I used my media background to approach situations strategically, always starting with the end in mind. I find it natural to take a long-term view. I did appeals on social media, e-mail campaigns, and I cut salaries by 20%. Then I did something that seemed a little crazy, but ultimately saved us. I knew that I would lose my Italian Director, my longest-serving and most valued staff member. If I did not find another source of income, she would not be able to cover her costs. I gave her my role as Global Fundraiser, so I was able to keep her and solely focus on Ghana. I became Ghana CEO, transitioning many staff out without affecting our services. This allowed us to survive. Today we have a 3-month contingency fund, fundraising is not exactly flourishing but it is coming back and we at OAfrica survived, no mean feat.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrxI2Bnedgw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqhxhvGErX8&t=6s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOPSVjM94sI
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPlE1GeXjGg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEIopC_BM9E
• https://youtu.be/v2JNYEXTXfw
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3RWAGM4i1M
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2t4Wln3MCA

• Most definitely programmatically as explained above – we need to bring the Care Reform Initiative to a successful conclusion and resettle children still in orphanages before it is too late. 
• We need to increase the general public’s understanding of the problems created by institutionalization in the developing world, as the fact that well-meaning donors directing money to illegal orphanages is a huge part of the problem. 
• We need to seize the opportunity of 2022 being our 20th anniversary by creating a report or film where we find the most effective way to demonstrate the impact we have had.
• We particularly need support with our social media, brand identity and marketing to improve our reach. 
• Public speaking, for me, could be a way to reach more people, but we would need to refine a script that does not attack people for their good intentions but rather encourages them to help positively. 
• Finally, we need help to roll out our transition plan as we have been proactive on working on founder’s syndrome and have started to roll out a transition plan. This stage would require board recruitment and education to move the organization forward as a Child Rights organization.

UNICEF: we carry out occasional projects in partnership, we also regularly share data.

Challenging Heights: we collaborate on implementation with this anti trafficking NGO. 

Curious Minds: this is a media NGO that focuses on children, and we often do combined programs.

The Hope and Homes For Children Coalition (deinstitutionalization): we are active in Africa, and traveled with them to Rwanda, escorting Ghanaian government officials for information exchange on the process of creating a care system without orphanages.

Government of Ghana: we support the government with drafting documents, funding training and tech, developing databases, hosting meetings, introducing partners and generally moving the country forward on the path to denationalization. 

French embassy in Ghana: we are grant recipients.

Better Care Network: is a resource base that we share information with.