Why do orphanages still exist if they cause harm?

Orphanages persist because they serve powerful institutional, economic and political interests and not because they are the best solution for children.

The orphanage economy is substantial. Orphanages concentrate funding, employment and influence in ways that make reform politically difficult. Around the world, orphanages have developed business models that depend on donations, voluntourism and government contracts.

In some contexts, the number of orphanages has grown even as child poverty has declined. Children become the currency of a system designed around their separation, not their flourishing. In Ghana, a government study found that 90% of children in orphanages had living parents and that 140 of the 148 orphanages in the country were unregistered.

The roots of this system run deep. Modern orphanage culture emerged from the colonial era, when imperial administrations and missionary organisations established institutions across Asia, Africa and the Americas, not as refuges for children without parents, but as tools of social control. The consequences, in Canada’s residential school system, Australia’s Stolen Generations, Ireland’s mother and baby homes, are now recognised as historic crimes.

The assumptions that created those institutions still shape child protection systems today. Children most likely to be placed in orphanages are disproportionately from families facing poverty, disability and discrimination reflecting structural inequalities embedded in systems that mistake injustice for parental failure.

We are working to change this.