Department

Public Policy Hub

Description or Abstract

Since 2016, the Egyptian Government has made many improvements to the Alternative Families System that aims to provide children without parental care with families. Yet, these families still face some obstacles in the monitoring and follow-up system after adoption. The paper sheds light on these obstacles; the roots and solution. We depend on qualitative methodological approaches, based on a purposive sample of key informants consisting of governmental officials, national and international entities, using in-depth interviews as the main tool for data collection, and surveys. As a result of our research, we found that there are limitations that affect the increasing number of abandoned children and make it harder for the families to take the decision of adoption, or worse, the deficiencies in the follow-up and monitoring system may lead to child abuse for the adopted children, such as the lack of skillful social workers. In addition, there is a dilemma in the Supportive role vs. the Supervisory role of the monitors. Finally, negative societal stereotyping towards abandoned children was identified especially by government officials in the MoSS.

This paper recommends reviewing the existing monitoring and follow-up strategies, upgrading the existing human capital, criteria of their selection, and related systems, and developing a national awareness campaign, especially through social media channels, to work on eliminating the effect of the social stigma towards the concept of adopted children.

Keywords

Alternative Families, Fostering, Fostered Children, Kafala System, Social Policy, Public Policy, Egypt

Credits/Acknowledgments

The paper is published by The Public Policy Hub - GAPP School (AUC), established in 2017:

Laila El Baradei (PI), Shahjahan Bhuiyan (Co-PI), Mohamed Kadry (Program Manager), Waleed El-Deeb (Senior Specialist), Ghadeer Ibrahim (Senior Outreach and Communications Specialist).

Faculty Advisor

Charles Kaye-Essien

Content Type

Other

Language

eng|| ara

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