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Revisit Malawi’s law of child adoption
by June Lutwama
The highly-publicised case of super star Madonna’s adoption of David Banda brings to light issues probably worth noting. According to media reports, the pop diva has been criticised by many quarters of flouting the adoption law of this country which, paraphrased, says, an adoptive parent should reside in Malawi for close to two years for monitoring before he or she can be allowed to take the baby permanently.
Apparently, Madonna has been given an interim court order to live with the child in the United Kingdom during the required period, and then later apply for permanent adoption. This law was formulated in 1949, before Malawi reached crisis levels of orphanage.
Legal child adoption is a foreign concept in Malawi especially because of our extended family system. It is, many times, automatic that orphaned children are “adopted” without legal afterthought. But the truth is there has been strain on many Malawian families as the
number of orphans keeps rising, especially in the face of the HIV and Aids pandemic.
The number of orphans in Malawi has reached a heart wrenching figure of approximately
one million—half of them HIV and Aids orphans. In many cases orphaned babies do not survive because of the economic and even emotional strain that clouds adoptive families.
So far part of the solution has been to put children in orphanages, but how long can a child live in an orphanage? How far does the responsibility go for a child’s economic and social wellbeing? Isn’t it time we seriously looked at international adoption as part of the solution? Some of these orphans could have a better chance in life if they were adopted by families willing to take children from developed countries or even within Malawi.
For example, hundreds of children are adopted from China and Eastern Europe every year. In China, the government allows only one child per family or two if the first one is a girl. This is to check the country’s high population. In a society that prefers baby boys, many parents prefer putting baby girls in orphanages and such institutions to avoid infanticide.
That situation has been highly publicised to the extent that many Western couples look to China when they want to adopt a child. There are adoption agencies that facilitate this. Just one of hundreds is an agency called Children’s Hope International. It reports on its website that by 2005 it had placed 7,906 Chinese babies for adoption since its inception in 1982.
Adoption agencies locate children in authorized orphanages, link them with potential adoptive parents, who are required to fill in extensive paper work. The whole process may last over a year. Adoptive parents often spend over US$10,000, depending on the agency and the situation.
Adoption agencies do not sell children but simply help families who are either unable to have children or simply want to adopt one. This may be a strange phenomena for Africa but is very common in the West.
Adoption agencies of course gain by collecting processing fees and such but their legal departments find it easier to w ork in countries where laws are conducive. The adoption process has a way of filtering the adoptive parents and can take over a year to complete, only that residency is not part of the deal.
The issue here is that maybe Malawi should revisit the law to help the rest of the world help us. Some things in the law need to be fine-tuned. International adoption is not new, but asking adoptive parents to stay in a country for close to two years for observation is probably a bit too much.
Adoptive couples in most countries should be 30 years or older, with or without children.
In Malawi the parents must be 25 years old and at least 25 years older than the child. The adoption law in Malawi becomes complicated because once a petition is filed at the magistrate’s court of the district where the parents live, the court is supposed to chose a social worker to monitor the adoptive parents and eventually submit a home study to the high court. After that the court may grant full adoption if the conditions are satisfactory.
This obviously prohibits foreigners who would like to adopt children from Malawi from coming because as they must first apply for a residency permit of some sort and actually live here before they can start the adoption process. Even though the child is given an interim court order, as in the recent case, the truth is that the monitoring period should be cleaned up to allow for easy facilitation of international adoptions.
There should be another way to filter the worthiness of potential adoptive parents to make the process realistic. Some Western families and individuals have gone only as far as financially supporting a Malawian orphan through organisations like World Vision.
Maybe others would want to adopt permanently. Who knows, now that a light has been shed on Malawi’s situation through the recent international media coverage, others might want to follow Mrs. Ritchie’s (Madonna) footsteps?
— The author is lecturer in Journalism, at the Malawi Polytechnic in
Blantyre.
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