Kenya halts adoptions on trafficking fears

Kenya has suspended adoption of children by foreigners, while it considers new policies.

The move followed that of neighboring Ethiopia, which halted adoption of children by foreigners in 2018, in an effort to curb trafficking.

After a cabinet meeting on Sept 12, chaired by President Uhuru Kenyatta, the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection was directed to streamline operations of the government's Child Welfare Society of Kenya.

The ministry was also tasked with drafting a new policy on foreign adoptions of Kenyan children.

The director of Kenyan national public prosecutions has also been tasked with investigating the state agency on charges of corruption and child neglect.

The move is seen as a response to alarming practices around child adoption processes that have recently been highlighted by Kenyan media.

In a case that gripped the country, a couple from the United States have been battling custody over a baby boy for months after their process was thwarted by the Child Welfare Society of Kenya. The baby has finally been united with the US couple.

According to existing Kenyan law, a child must be at least six weeks old and declared free for adoption by a registered adoption society before an adoption can proceed.

However, there have been cases where foreign nationals were stopped while taking children out of Kenya after it was discovered that the children were not abandoned orphans and still had known families.

In 2014, the Kenyan government issued a similar directive to ban adoption by foreigners after a review revealed weaknesses in the legal system, which made it susceptible to manipulation leading to commercialization of adoption processes.

A 2017 report from the Department of Children's Services in the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development in conjunction with the UNICEF supported children staying with family members over adoption.

There were also concerns among stakeholders that foreign adoptions were being sought for the wrong reasons and "children so adopted are being removed from the country without the necessary checks having been previously been done by a foreign adoption society", said the report.

The report recommended that no more charitable children's institutions be opened and that punitive actions be considered for those that ignored the order. There were between 1,000 and 1,500 such institutions in the country in 2017.

Existing ones were to be inspected and those falling short of the requirements shut down. Data was also to be collected and submitted to the government every year showing the number of children accepted by the institutions and those that had been reunited with their families.

It also recommended that the state provide funding for adoption procedures to eliminate commercialization. This would especially be helpful to Kenyan families willing to adopt the children but unable to meet high charges set by adoption societies.

This situation inadvertently led to more than 60 percent of local applicants withdrawing from the adoption process even after they had fostered the children they wanted to adopt, government figures show.

According to a UN report, children make up a high proportion of people trafficked globally.

One in six victims trafficked in Kenya for forced labor, sexual exploitation and begging, among other purposes, is a child, according to a report by Kenyan news site NationNewsplex early this year.