Abstract
Many children in sub-Saharan Africa find themselves without adequate parental care, resulting from growing levels of poverty, disease (e.g., Aids and Ebola), harmful cultural norms, conflict, and trafficking, among others. In Africa, most orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) are taken care by the relatives and other community members, but this traditional system is under stress, and many OVC end up on their own on the streets or in child-headed households (Leinaweaver, 2014). Others enter the formal alternative care system (also known as foster or out-of-home care) provided through residential care facilities known by different names, such as orphanages, child and youth care centers, or children’s homes. Recent estimates suggest that about 2.7 million children are in formal care globally, of which about 11% live in sub-Saharan Africa (Petrowski, Cappa, & Gross, 2017). However, many more children are unaccounted for in unregistered facilities run by nongovernmental organizations dotted across the continent (Milligan, Withington, Connelly, & Gale, 2016).
Because reunification services are absent, there is a limited improvement in the conditions of their families, resulting in many children being in long-term care. However, youth in alternative care must leave at some point, usually at 18 years, to make a life on their own. Their transition to adulthood is atypical to the normative trend. Young people in the wider population are staying longer with their parents to deal with the demands of emerging adulthood, the developmental stage between the ages of 18 and 26 years. Despite care-leavers becoming a growing vulnerable population in Africa, they are neglected in policy, practice, and research agendas (Pinkerton, 2011). Evidence from Africa is conspicuously missing in the international literature that is dominated by countries of the Global North, such as the UK and the United States (Mann-Feder & Goyette, 2019; Mendes & Snow, 2016; Stein & Munro, 2008).
While scant evidence has emerged from Africa over the last few decades, this has been almost entirely from South Africa and Ghana only. The 10 papers in this special issue, initiated by the Africa Network of Care-Leaving Researchers, add to the African literature on care-leaving and contribute to the global dialogue on the subject. Drawn from six countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe), the studies delve into varied aspects of care-leavers’ experiences, attitudes, and views. They report robust evidence from qualitative data (Bond, 2020; Frimpong-Manso, 2020; Gwenzi, 2020; Moodley, Raniga, & Sewpaul, 2020; Takele & Kotecho, 2020), quantitative data (Dickens & Marx, 2020), and mixed methods data (Bukuluki, Kamya, Kasirye, & Nabulya, 2020; Dziro, 2020). Most of the evidence comes from residential care, but there is also a focus on nonformal kinship care, an area on which very little is written, despite being the major form of alternative care for OVC on the continent. Key themes that emerge from the collection of studies in this special edition include outcomes, resilience, family and sociocultural networks, and transitional support.
Outcomes
Several papers (Dickens & Marx, 2020; Dziro, 2020; Moodley et al., 2020; Sekibo, 2020; Takele & Kotecho, 2020) provide evidence that irrespective of the type of care, youth transitioning into emerging adulthood face multiple challenges. While some country-specific challenges exist, most care-leavers have poor outcomes in three key areas of their lives: employment, accommodation, and social integration. In South Africa, for example, Dickens and Marx (2020) found that youth who left care were often not in employment, education, or training (NEET). This situation resulted in financial difficulties for young people, affecting their ability to access self-supporting accommodation or continue their education. Evidence of these challenges faced by care-leavers in the Global South is reminiscent of those experienced by their peers in the Global North, but those in Africa have a heightened risk of achieving poor outcomes due to the volatile socioeconomic conditions into which they transition, such as high rates of crime, unemployment, and poverty. In addition, they have limited social welfare programs or specific programs for care-leavers and a weakened ability of family systems to provide informal support.
Resilience
Apart from focusing on emerging adults in this special issue, several papers used the theory of resilience to conceptualize their findings. Resilience refers to the “multilevel processes [care-leavers] engage in to achieve better-than-expected outcomes in the face or wake of adversity” (van Breda, 2018, p. 4). Drawing on research from South Africa, van Breda (2016) concludes that both agency and structure are important factors that help in the successful transition from care. The papers in this special issue repeatedly emphasize that despite the odds and adversities, African youth who leave care exhibit resilience by navigating toward better outcomes. Several attain high educational qualifications, are in stable marriages, and do not use drugs (Bukuluki et al., 2020; Dickens & Marx, 2020; Frimpong-Manso, 2020). The youth’s personal motivation, including their hope for the future and fear of failure, enables them to succeed during their transition. However, social factors (e.g., preparation, social support, positive relationships) feature more prominently in their narratives as factors that facilitate more successful transitioning.
Family and Sociocultural Networks
Most papers in this issue note the importance of family and sociocultural networks, indicating the human quest for connectedness. Interviews with young people in Gwenzi’s (2020) study suggest that they have a refined notion of ‘family'. While their definitions include caregivers and peers from care, because of being in a family-like living arrangement, the biological family is still the most important to them, even though many have had negative experiences and lose connections with them during their time in care. Many speak of their need to trace and connect with their living biological family members after leaving care, often because of the realization that life was difficult without support. Care-leavers in Ethiopia reconnected with their families to satisfy their need for an identity and sense of belonging, even though it could threaten the positive progress made in certain areas of their lives such as education (Takele & Kotecho, 2020). Dickens and Marx (2020) report that, though many of the care-leavers in their study were NEET, they were mostly living in formal dwelling spaces rather than informal dwellings, because many lived with their families 2 years after leaving care. Bukuluki, Kamya, Kasirye, and Nabulya (2020) and Frimpong-Manso (2020) also provide evidence of the importance of social support from family and community networks to successful care-leaving.
Moodley, Raniga, and Sewpaul (2020), therefore, argue that based on the poor outcomes experienced by care-leavers and the family and other social networks’ role in their outcomes, the neoliberal philosophy of independent living adopted as a marker of a successful transition from care is unrealistic, especially in the African context. Rather, interdependency as a conceptual framework for care-leaving, which resonates with the African philosophy of Ubuntu, should be the focus.
Transitional Support
The studies in this issue highlight the policy and practice space in Africa. Almost all the papers highlight the young people’s limited preparation for interdependent living. Apart from the study from South Africa (Bond, 2020), care-leavers in the other countries reveal that preparation occurred informally as part of their daily activities. While the experiential nature of preparation was recognized, there was evidence of the demand for an organized preparation program providing the youth with employment, life, and communal skills among others. There was also the issue of the ad hoc character of aftercare provision owing to the lack of policy in all the countries studied.
The Way Forward: Implications for Policy, Practice, and Research
The issues that emerge from the papers in this issue prompt improvements to policy, practice, and research. The papers have shown the limitations in preparing young people leaving care for the transition to adulthood. The studies show that life after care is often very different from what young people experience in care. Youth, therefore, need to transition through a structured process that prepares them for managing the demands of the adult world outside care.
Social workers and other carers and professionals should help youth gain interdependent more than independent living skills, including basic living skills, increasing their employability through acquisition of practical entrepreneurial or vocational skills and enhancing their ability to mobilize useful social support networks. Social workers can also help resolve some of the issues confronting care-leavers by educating the society on the challenges care-leavers experience and the factor contributing to negative outcomes, such as stigma, discrimination, and lack of social support. There is also the need to develop distinct legislation and guidelines to cater for care-leavers since the issues they face in the process of transition to adulthood are not addressed by the existing policy frameworks in most African countries.
In terms of research, this special issue recommends that care-leaving research should reflect on what is happening globally and that researchers should routinely use evidence from both the Global South and Global North, except in instances where there is a strong justification for using only localized knowledge (van Breda & Pinkerton, 2020). For this to happen, there must be an increase in the quantity, quality, and accessibility of research from the Global South. This collection of papers uses mostly cross-sectional, qualitative methodologies, suggesting opportunities for increased quantitative research, longitudinal studies, and those that utilize existing administrative data that are underpinned by different theories.
