Our Director of Global Advocacy Brenda Kariuki responds to the recent 60 Minutes segment which uncritically promoted an orphanage in Haiti.
Last week, millions of viewers tuned in to a 60 Minutes segment featuring bestselling author Mitch Albom and his Have Faith Haiti orphanage in Port-au-Prince. The images were powerful: a walled compound rising above a city consumed by gang violence, children smiling in classrooms, a Haitian director who himself grew up in the same institution and is now heading to American universities for further studies. Anderson Cooper was visibly moved. Social media was flooded with admiration. Donations poured in.
We understand why.
When a country is burning, when gangs control 90% of a capital city, when children are starving on the other side of a 30-foot wall, the instinct to do something, anything, is deeply human. Mitch Albom clearly loves those children. His staff risk their lives to show up every single day. We do not question any of that.
But love, courage, and good intentions are not enough. And that is exactly what nearly a century of research on institutional care is telling us – loudly, consistently, and in a way we can no longer afford to ignore.
The Story Behind the Story
Here is what the 60 Minutes cameras did not linger on: 80% of children in Haitian orphanages have at least one living parent. This is not a fringe statistic. It is a figure confirmed by the Haitian government itself, by the Lumos Foundation, and corroborated by peer-reviewed research published in academic journals including BMC Pediatrics.
Haiti currently has approximately 750 orphanages housing an estimated 30,000 children. Fewer than 15% of those institutions are registered with the government. At least 140 are believed to have living conditions so harmful that children face severe risk of violence, exploitation, neglect, and preventable death.
The primary driver sending children into these institutions is not the absence of parents. It is poverty. It is parents who cannot afford school fees, who cannot put food on the table, who – desperate for their children to have what they cannot provide – make the heartbreaking choice to hand them over. When a well-funded orphanage appears in a community offering food, education, and safety, it becomes the only option a poor family can see. We call this the “pull effect”, and it is one of the most destructive forces in child welfare.
After the 2010 earthquake, the number of orphanages in Haiti grew by at least 150% in just three years. The earthquake was devastating. But the international response – well-meaning foreigners flooding Haiti with donations earmarked for orphanages – inadvertently transformed an emergency into an industry.
What the Research Actually Says
At Hope and Homes for Children, we have spent over thirty years studying and acting on one of the most well-evidenced bodies of knowledge in child development: orphanages harm children – even good ones.
This is not ideology. It is science.
- A meta-analysis of 75 studies covering more than 3,800 children across 19 countries (Van IJzendoorn, Luijk & Juffer, 2008) found that children raised in institutional care had, on average, an IQ 20 points lower than peers in family-based care – an average of 84 compared to 104.
- The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) – the first and only randomised controlled trial of foster care versus institutional care – demonstrated across nearly two decades of follow-up that children placed in families consistently outperformed those who remained in institutions across cognitive, physical, and psychological development. Crucially, earlier placement produced greater gains, pointing to sensitive periods in childhood development that institutions simply cannot support.
- Children in institutional settings experience profound disruption in attachment. Research within the BEIP found that institutionalised children showed markedly higher rates of disorganised attachment – a pattern strongly associated with lifelong difficulties in relationships, emotional regulation, and mental health.
- Babies in institutional settings are exposed to chronically elevated levels of cortisol – the stress hormone – which can damage the architecture of the developing brain at the most critical stage of growth.
And that is in institutions run with the best intentions. The research is clear: even where staff are kind and resources are adequate, the institutional model itself cannot replicate what children need most – the consistent, individualised, unconditional love of a family.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child does not mince words. Every child has the right to grow up in a family. Institutional care, however well-resourced, is a violation of that right.
The Haiti-Specific Danger
Haiti is not just a generalised case study. It is a country where the orphanage economy has become a system that actively manufactures the very problem it claims to solve.
Some orphanage directors employ what are effectively “child finders” – individuals paid to go into poor rural communities and persuade families to surrender their children, sometimes through outright deception, with promises of education and a better life. These children are then used to attract foreign donors. In some documented cases, children have been deliberately kept in poor conditions to maximise donations. The Lumos Foundation has documented consistent patterns of this behaviour in Haiti, including alteration of children’s records, inducement of birth parents to relinquish children, and the siphoning of donated funds away from children’s welfare.
Haiti also has one of the highest rates of child trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. The orphanage system, particularly when flooded with unregulated foreign funding, is deeply entangled with this reality, as confirmed by both the Haitian government and international child rights organisations.
When a celebrity tells the world that what Haiti’s children need is a well-funded orphanage, even one run with genuine love and extraordinary commitment, the downstream effect risks directing tens of millions more dollars into a system that is, in aggregate, separating children from families rather than strengthening families and protecting the children.
“But These Children Have No One”
This is the question we are always asked, and it deserves a direct answer.
There will always be children who have truly lost both parents and all extended family – children who genuinely cannot return home. For those children, we absolutely support high-quality, small-scale residential care as a temporary measure on a pathway to family-based placement. We are not calling for children to be left on the streets.
What we are calling for is a fundamental shift in where the money goes.
The resources that sustain a single orphanage – the staff, the buildings, the security, the administration – can, when redirected, keep dozens of families together. Family strengthening programmes, community-based support, kinship care, and properly supported foster care all produce vastly better outcomes for children, at lower cost, and without the lifelong developmental harm that institutional care causes.
In country after country – Romania, Rwanda, Cambodia, Serbia – we have seen this transformation succeed. Children once locked behind institutional walls are now growing up in loving families, thriving in ways the orphanage could never have enabled.
What We Are Asking of You
We are not asking you to stop caring about Haiti’s children. We are asking you to care better.
Before you donate to an orphanage in Haiti or anywhere else, ask:
- Is this organisation working towards its own closure by transitioning children to families?
- Does it invest in family support and reunification, or does it only invest in the institution itself?
- Is it registered with and accountable to the national child welfare authority?
- What happens to children when they “age out”?
If the answers to those questions are unclear, your money may be fuelling the very crisis you want to end.
The children on the other side of that 30-foot wall in Port-au-Prince deserve more than a walled compound, however lovingly maintained. They deserve what every child on earth deserves: a family. A community. A future that does not depend on the continued generosity of a foreign benefactor.
Haiti’s crisis is real. The suffering of its children is real. But the answer to a broken system is not a better-looking version of the same broken system. The answer is to build what has always worked: family.
