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Shelter Works to Prevent Institutionalization of Georgian Children
World Vision and its partners opened Georgia’s first mother-and-infant shelter on April 18. In this former Soviet republic where most abandoned children are left to languish in orphanages, the shelter’s goal is to keep infants with their mothers and to return already institutionalized children to their birth families. World Vision is working with the Georgian group EveryChild, UNICEF, and the Georgian Ministries of Labor, Health, Social Affairs and EducationThe shelter not only provides housing and care for mothers and their infants, but also offers counseling about foster care and adoption, access to vocational training, job placement and small group loans. Social workers develop caring relationships with birth mothers and their extended families, and encourage families to provide as much support as possible to mothers and their children.
With no social welfare system, many Georgians see orphanages as a viable alternative when families cannot support children. In fact, the rate of child abandonment and institutionalization is increasing, with some 5,000 children housed in orphanages across the country.
“It is alarming to realize that most children who are institutionalized here remain in orphanages for their entire childhoods,” said World Vision program manager Nancy Archer. “They never know what it’s like to live in a family. Many of them resort to street crime, drug dealing and prostitution to survive when they are forced out of the institutions at 18.”
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