What Australian Charities Must Know About the Hidden Risks of Orphanage Support

Many Australian charities support orphanages and residential care overseas with the best of intentions, wanting to give children food, education and shelter. But there is a growing body of evidence, and growing regulatory concern, that this kind of support can cause the harm it is trying to prevent.

The orphanage business model

In many countries, the existence of orphanages tracks foreign funding more closely than it tracks genuine need. Foreign donations make an orphanage a viable business, which creates an incentive to recruit children to fill beds, sometimes by persuading parents that their children will get a better education and more opportunities in care. Studies in some countries have found that 80 percent or more of children in orphanages have at least one living parent. These are not orphans. They are children separated from families who could care for them with the right support.

The harm is well documented. Children raised in institutions rather than families show higher rates of attachment disorders, developmental delay, abuse and exploitation, and difficulty reintegrating into society as adults.

Modern slavery and DFAT's position

Orphanage trafficking, recruiting children into residential care for profit, was recognised under Australia's Modern Slavery Act in 2018. Australian charities that fund a facility engaged in this practice can be complicit, and larger charities carry their own modern slavery reporting obligations on top of that. DFAT is explicit that it does not fund orphanages or residential care institutions as part of its development programme, reflecting the broader consensus that family-based care serves children better and institutional care should be a last resort.

What to fund instead

Family strengthening. Economic support for struggling families, parenting support, and access to healthcare and education, so children can stay with the family they already have.

Family-based care. Where a child genuinely cannot stay with their parents, kinship care, foster care and adoption support are better options than an institution.

Reintegration. Family tracing and reunification, community reintegration, and follow-up support for reunified families, to help children already in institutional care move out of it.

Community-based services. Community childcare, after-school programmes and youth development, which support children without separating them from their families.

If your charity organises visits or volunteers

Short-term volunteering in residential care settings can do real harm. Children form and then lose attachments as volunteers rotate through, are exposed to a stream of unscreened adults, and the practice itself reinforces the demand that keeps the orphanage model going. If your charity does organise visits, limit direct contact with children, focus support on infrastructure rather than caregiving, background-check every visitor, never allow unsupervised access, and genuinely ask whether the visit benefits the children or mainly the visitors.

Before you fund a facility

Check whether children in the facility genuinely need institutional care, verify they have not been recruited from families to fill beds, and consider whether your funding is helping perpetuate a harmful model rather than solving the problem it is meant to solve.

Where to go for help

See the Smartraveller guide to volunteering overseas and the ECS Standard 4 guidance directly.

If you want to redirect existing support toward family-based alternatives without disrupting the children currently depending on it, that is exactly the kind of transition we can help plan. Explore our services or get in touch.