The theme this year is empowering local communities. It is a call the humanitarian sector should hear all the way down to the children who are still being left behind – the children confined in orphanages.
On 19 August, we mark World Humanitarian Day. The theme this year is Strengthening Global Solidarity and Empowering Local Communities. The ongoing #ActForHumanity campaign asks us to hold three things in mind at once. The record dangers faced by aid workers in conflict zones. The fact that most frontline responders support their own communities. And the impunity with which international rules are being broken.
I want to add a fourth thing to that list. The theme is a challenge to the humanitarian sector to interrogate the models it still funds — and to see the populations the sector still does not fully see.
In my field, one of those populations is the children confined in orphanages in the world’s most fragile regions. And they should be a priority for humanitarian response.
Two facts that matter.
There are 1.2 million children in orphanages across the world’s most fragile regions today. That would fill Wembley Stadium more than thirteen times over. They are the population the humanitarian system was not built to reach — trapped in fixed buildings when the shells fall, dependent on paid staff who flee or are conscripted, cut off from supply chains that collapse, exposed to traffickers with no legal guardian to search for them.
80% of these children are not orphans. They have a living parent, a grandparent, a sibling, an aunt or an uncle. They are in orphanages because systems failed them, not because they have no one to go home to. The families exist. The humanitarian system’s job is to reach them.
Two numbers. One argument. These children are a priority the humanitarian system has not yet made room for. On World Humanitarian Day, that must change.
What locally-led actually looks like
At Hope and Homes for Children, family-strengthening, kinship placement, community reintegration and government partnership are done by professionals who are from and of the country they serve. Rwandans are leading the near-elimination of orphanages in Rwanda. Ukrainians led our emergency response to the February 2022 invasion, moving children into safe family care in weeks. We were founded in Bosnia in 1994, at the moment the Bosnian War exposed the failure of institutional care in conflict, and we have worked across fragile and conflict-affected states ever since.
That is what empowering local communities means when we take it seriously. Not consultation as a courtesy. Authorship of the response.
And it does not mean withdrawing when the crisis comes. It means being there before it, during it, and after it, because our teams live where they work.
The orphanage is a colonial model. It is time to name it and let it go.
Orphanages are, in many parts of the world, a colonial import. They were exported to low- and middle-income countries as a model of provision for vulnerable children — and they persist as legacy infrastructure long after the countries that built them abandoned them at home. It is a nineteenth-century model still being funded in the twenty-first century by a humanitarian sector that knows better.
Conflict does not create the harms these institutions cause. It exposes and accelerates failures that already exist.
#ActForHumanity means acting for these children too
The #ActForHumanity call asks for accountability, protection and cooperation. All three apply here.
- Accountability, through an anticipatory accountability framework that needs to be developed, with urgency to secure every child in confinement long before the crises and conflicts arise.
- Protection, through recognising deinstitutionalisation as anticipatory humanitarian action — pre-positioned before the next conflict arrives, not delivered in its aftermath.
- Cooperation, through funders, governments, treaty bodies, humanitarian actors and philanthropy working across the silos that currently keep this population invisible.
This World Humanitarian Day, we honour the aid workers who are killed and injured protecting others. We honour the local staff who make the humanitarian system work when no one else can reach the community. And we should honour the children whose lives depend on that system — including the children the system does not yet see.
Every one of those children has a name. Most have a living parent. They are not children who lack families. They are children whose families lack power.
Get them Back to Family. Before the next conflict hits.
Brenda Kariuki is the Director of Global Advocacy at Hope and Homes for Children. You can view her LinkedIn profile here: Brenda Wanjiku Kariuki on LinkedIn.
