The Ghetto Kids, Shakira, and what a billion viewers aren’t being told
When Shakira announced that Uganda’s Ghetto Kids would join her on stage at the FIFA World Cup final halftime show at MetLife Stadium on 19 July, the response was almost universally joyful. A billion people will watch. The story writes itself: children from the streets of Kampala dancing on the world’s biggest stage. Talent triumphing over adversity. Africa celebrated.
I understand that joy. I worked in Uganda for over a decade. I know Kampala. I know what talent looks like in the communities, schools, and compounds there — and the Ghetto Kids are genuinely talented. But I have also spent twenty years working in child protection and care reform across Africa and Asia, and when I see children from orphanages placed on a global stage, framed as an inspiration story, I feel no joy, just deep concern. And I think that concern is worth naming — because this is not the first time we’ve been here.
We have been here before
In 2023, the Ghetto Kids earned the coveted golden buzzer on Britain’s Got Talent — the first time judge Bruno Tonioli had ever used it. The response was euphoric. And it prompted a careful, important critique from The Conversation — and more significantly, a direct statement from the Ugandan Care Leavers Association, who recognised the good intentions behind the public support while speaking from their own lived experience about the lifelong harm of growing up in orphanages. Sadly, there was little media critique of the Ghetto Kids, and ITV and the production team behind Britain’s Got Talent refused to comment or engage in any dialogue.
Similarly, when Netflix aired Masaka Kids — a Rhythm Within, an Archewell Production — a media company owned by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — we saw significant funds flowing into the orphanage to build a larger residential facility, resulting in more children being recruited into it.
Now the Ghetto Kids are heading to the World Cup final. The platform is bigger. The audience is larger. And the questions the care leavers raised in 2023 are just as relevant today — except almost no one is asking them.
What the Ghetto Kids actually are — and why the framing matters
Let’s be precise about this, because the media coverage rarely is. The Ghetto Kids are described in outlet after outlet as children who “grew up in poverty on the streets of Kampala.” That origin story is central to the narrative of their rise. But the Ghetto Kids are children living in an orphanage in Kampala’s Katwe area — a children’s institution housing over thirty children between the ages of four and sixteen, run by founder Dauda Kavuma.
That is not a criticism of Kavuma or of the intentions behind the care provided. It is a statement of fact that the coverage consistently blurs. And it matters — because it is the institutional framing of the Ghetto Kids’ story that makes it possible to present their success as evidence that orphanages work, that institutions produce opportunity, that placing children in orphanages is the path to a better life.
That is a message with real-world consequences. And it is a message that decades of research has shown to be fundamentally wrong.
What the evidence tells us about orphanages and children’s development
📌 Key facts
• Over 80% of children in orphanages are not orphans — they are there because of poverty, not because they have no family
• The Lancet Commission’s 2020 systematic review was unequivocal: orphanages cause severe and lasting harm to children’s brain development, physical growth, and emotional wellbeing
• Up to one in three care leavers end up homeless; one in five have a criminal record
• Across every measurable indicator — health, education, housing, employment — care-experienced people fare worse than their peers
The evidence is not ambiguous — and it is not new. Decades of research show that orphanages cannot replace the love and attention that only a family can provide. Deprived of consistent attachment to a primary caregiver, children in orphanages suffer severe and lasting impairment — in brain development, physical growth, emotional and cognitive development. The Lancet Commission’s 2020 systematic review was unequivocal. This is the settled scientific consensus.
The harm follows children out too. Up to one in three care leavers end up homeless. One in five with a criminal record. Across every measurable indicator — health, education, housing, employment — care-experienced people fare worse than their peers. And underneath the statistics is something harder to measure but perhaps more damaging still: a profound absence of belonging. No family to return to. No community roots. No one whose door they can knock on.
Meanwhile the families and communities these children came from receive nothing — while the resources locked inside orphanages, which cost far more per child than family care, remain unavailable to the people who could have prevented separation in the first place. Every dollar spent running an orphanage is a dollar not spent keeping a family together.
This is the system the Ghetto Kids’ World Cup performance will normalise in front of a billion viewers. Not intentionally. But unmistakably.
The orphan myth — amplified to a billion viewers
The media coverage of the Ghetto Kids’ World Cup invitation describes them as “orphaned or vulnerable children.” It is estimated that globally over 80% of children in orphanages have at least one living parent. In Uganda, as elsewhere, children are rarely placed in orphanages because of orphanhood. They are placed there because of poverty — because a family cannot access food, healthcare, or education, and an orphanage appears to offer all three. Research consistently shows that parents can be empowered to care for their children when the right support is available.
The “orphan” framing is not accidental. It is a powerful fundraising narrative — and it is the narrative that organisations like the Ghetto Kids have an institutional interest in maintaining. The Association of Care Leavers Uganda, in their 2023 statement on the Britain’s Got Talent appearance, were clear about this dynamic. Recognising the genuine goodwill behind the public response, they nonetheless called for an end to the promotion of orphanages without considering the alternatives that enable children to stay connected to their families and communities.
During my time working in Uganda — for a large part for the Ugandan Government, developing Uganda’s Alternative Care Framework, updating child protection frameworks and guidelines, and designing assessment tools used in orphanages — I visited many institutions like the Ghetto Kids’. There were very few children who had genuinely lost both parents, with almost none whose family or extended clan could not be traced. The “orphan” framing is not just inaccurate — it is a narrative these institutions depend on, because without it, the donations dry up.
The perversity of the optics
Here is what I find most troubling about the Shakira World Cup moment, and about the Britain’s Got Talent moment before it. Both present themselves as celebrations of Ugandan children’s talent. Both are received as uplifting, empowering, cross-cultural. And both quietly reinforce one of the most damaging ideas in international development: that the talented children of Uganda worth celebrating are the ones in orphanages.
There are millions of children in Uganda growing up in families and communities, attending schools, dancing in compounds and church halls. All of them are extraordinarily gifted. None of them will perform at the World Cup final. They have no institutional structure behind them to create viral videos, manage social media accounts, and secure a slot on the world’s biggest stage. They live with their parents and families — and in the strange economy of global attention, that makes them invisible.
The children who are seen, the children who get the platform — are the ones who are institutionalised. And every time that happens, every time a billion people watch and feel inspired, the message sent — however unintentionally — is that orphanages work, that they are pipelines to opportunity, that placing a child from a poor family into an orphanage is a gift, not a harm. This reinforces the white saviour mentality that has undermined authentic African culture and talent.
What Shakira could do — and what any of us can do
I do not doubt Shakira’s sincerity. She has built a genuine relationship with the Ghetto Kids, and she has her own foundation — Pies Descalzos — with a longstanding commitment to children’s education and welfare. That is real.
But a performer with her platform has the reach to do something more than celebrate the children already on the stage. She could ask why the children who get the stage are so often the ones in orphanages. She could use the attention of the World Cup to amplify the voices of the global network of care leavers — people with lived experience of the system — rather than simply the system’s most visible output. She could direct the hundreds of millions of viewers who will be moved by the Ghetto Kids’ performance toward the evidence, and toward the alternatives.
It is quite common for well-intentioned people to finance orphanages with the hope of offering children a better future. Those same resources, redirected toward family and community strengthening — education, healthcare access, child protection systems, community-based services, livelihoods support, parent and carer support — would help many more children than any orphanage ever could. And they would do so without separating those children from the families and communities that are the foundation of a healthy life. That is what Back to Family means in practice.
The Ghetto Kids will perform on 19 July, and I hope that somewhere in that billion-strong audience, someone asks the question the coverage is not asking: why are the most visible Ugandan children in the world the ones who are institutionalised? What does that say about the system we are applauding? And what would it take to make the children growing up in families — whose talent no one is packaging and promoting — visible too?
The global movement to end orphanages is working — and moments like this undermine it
There is a global movement to end orphanages — one that is working. Across the world, care systems are being reformed to prioritise family strengthening, build community-based child protection services, and ensure that children are supported before separation ever happens. We have thousands of examples of genuine transformation: orphanages repurposed as family support centres, children reintegrated with their own families, communities that no longer need institutions because they have something better.
This impactful work is constantly undermined — and chronically underfunded — because of moments like this one. Every time a celebrity platforms an orphanage performance group, every time the media frames orphanages as a story of hope and triumph, donations flow toward buildings and beds rather than toward the families and communities that would render those buildings unnecessary.
It also drowns out a story that deserves far more recognition: the thousands of football club foundations around the world doing exactly what good development work looks like — at the grassroots, where it matters most. From Wales to Brazil to Uganda, football clubs are embedded in their communities, running programmes that strengthen families, engage young people, and build belonging — not by removing children from their communities, but by investing in them. My own club, Cardiff City FC Foundation, is one of thousands doing this work — work that rarely makes global headlines but transforms lives at the local level every single day. Surely the World Cup — the greatest celebration of football on earth — should be platforming that story.
The beautiful game, at its best, brings communities together. It does not take children out of them.
Which brings us back to New Jersey on 19 July. FIFA and Shakira have an extraordinary opportunity in front of a billion viewers. Instead, it looks very much like they are about to score a massive own goal — one whose consequences will be felt not on a pitch in New Jersey, but in the lives of children across Uganda and beyond, pushed further from their families and deeper into a system the world should be dismantling, not celebrating.
Shakira and FIFA should know and do better.
Mark Riley
Senior Programmes Lead, Hope and Homes for Children. Mark has spent over 20 years in child protection and care reform across Africa and Asia, including more than a decade living and working in Uganda. He developed Uganda’s Alternative Care Framework (2012) while working for the Government of Uganda and helped establish what is now the Association of Care Leavers Uganda. His earlier analysis of orphanage performance tours is at hopeandhomes.org. Research on the impacts of orphanages and the case for ending them is set out in HHC’s Myth-Buster: Ending Orphanages.
