Community-based care

Community-based care for orphans describes care for orphaned children by those who are not the biological parents but are able to provide individual care and nurture in the context of a family and community.

The two main models of community-based orphan care are kinship care and foster care. Kinship care includes care of orphans by grandparents and other relatives, as well as teenager-headed households. Fostering can be defined as a temporary form of substitute care which does not involve the transfer of parental rights and responsibilities.

Community-based care programs may be described as having a strong ‘prevention’ component, in that they seek to strengthen community coping capacities in order to avoid the institutionalization of the child.

Reasons for community-based care
Community-based care arose as an alternative to orphanage and other forms of residential care for several reasons including:

1. Children in residential care lack opportunities for close relationships with trusted adults and this may impair children’s capacity to make and sustain relationships with other people.

2. Children in residential care lack opportunities to learn traditional roles and skills – many young people emerge from childhood in an institution with no perception of different adult roles, and no understanding of the customs and traditions that underpin daily life.

3. Residential care creates a deep-rooted sense of dependency, with children being denied opportunities to learn to become self-reliant and self-directing.

4. Children in residential care often lose their sense of family, clanship or tribal identity; they lack the security and strength that comes from identifying with family and ancestors. Instead, they may assume a negative identity (for example, ‘the orphanage child’ and face the stigma and prejudice that results.

5. Where children have lost contact with their families they will have to enter adult life without the support, which the extended family and community traditionally offers in most cultures.

Advantages
The main advantages of community-based care are as follows:

Cost-effectiveness: community-based care for orphans is a more cost-effective approach to orphan care because the emphasis is not on providing resources from outside, but rather identifying the existing resources in a community and building on those.

Community participation: There is an extremely high degree of community participation in community-based care programs because the onus is on communities to care for their own orphans. Extended families will frequently take sole responsibility for many orphans, using their own resources to provide accommodation, food, clothing, education and nurture. Neighbours and local organizations such as churches often make a tangible contribution by helping out struggling families with child minding, advice and other contributions.

Connectedness: Community-based care allows children to stay within the network of people that have loved and nurtured them throughout their lives.

Examples
Africa: The FOCUS program run by Family AIDS Caring Trust in Zimbabwe has mobilized community volunteers to visit and encourage more than 4000 orphans. Bethany Children's Trust http://www.bethanychildrenstrust.fsnet.co.uk/index.htm has community-based care projects for orphans in Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda and Mozambique reaching thousands of orphans.

Asia: Project HALO http://www.urbanhalo.org (Hope, Assistance and Love for Orphans) run by Servants to Asia's Urban Poor http://www.servantsasia.org in Cambodia has mobilized the community to care for more than 1000 orphans.