Selling Destitute Children of the Proud Nation (Ethiopia) in the

Name of Adoption

Asnake Demena

1. Introduction

Ethiopia is a diverse country with unique history. It has diverse ethnic groups with unique way of
life of the people, diverse topography with diverse climate, diverse agro-ecology with diverse
flora and fauna. Ethiopia is rich, not only with resources but also in its values and culture. It has
a strong culture of caring for orphans and other needy members of the society by nuclear and
extended family members as well as churches and mosques for centuries. Based on cultural and
religious beliefs, provision of care to orphaned, abandoned, and vulnerable children has been
seen as the duty of the extended family system among most of the ethnic groups in the country.
Historical records indicated that among the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups, domestic
adoption has been practiced since the 15th century (Beckstorm, 1972).

However, this practice has been systematically discouraged by the ethnic politics of the current
dictatorial regime of Ethiopia. Consequently, destitute children were left without protection and
care, which in turn has created an opportunity for corrupted government officials and adoption
agencies to make money by selling these “manufactured orphans” in the name of adoption. This
article will explore serious irregularities such as fraud and other criminal activities within the
adoption industry of Ethiopia. Data on 16 major receiving states have been used and the analysis
will cover the period from 2004 to 2013 to show trends of adoptions for the past 10 years. This
doesn‟t mean that there was no intercountry adoption before or after the indicated years.
However, obtaining reliable and complete data about adoption trends in Ethiopia is impossible.
For this reason, the data for this article was obtained from Australian Intercountry Adoption
Network (AICAN) and Hague Convention Statistics as well as other indirect sources.

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 1.2. Intercountry adoption in Ethiopia

Intercountry adoption is a new phenomenon in Ethiopia. It was emerged by the current

authoritarian regime of the country in 1994 as a solution for its failure to satisfy basic needs of
the society. It is a familiar fact that millions of Ethiopian families are suffering from politically
induced problems such as continued ethnic conflict, corruption, poverty, famine and disease. As
a result, there is a premature death of many parents in the country. This has left thousands of
children without families and care. The condition of these destitute children is miserable in light
of the country‟s weak economy. This is largely due to a vast amount of Ethiopia‟s funds being
diverted to military activities to prolong the life of the regime in power. Furthermore, there is
massive financial outflows and drainage of national saving of the country for several years.

A recent study produced by Global Financial Integrity (GFI, 2013) indicated that Ethiopia has
lost 13.04 billion US Dollar to illicit financial outflows between 2002 and 2011. According to
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2014), it is impossible to
estimate exactly the number of services citizens could have received had these funds stayed in
their countries of origin and had they been put to development use. A mere portion of these funds
would have significant positive impact: every $100 million recovered could fund full
immunisations for 4 million children or provide water connections for some 250 000 households
in a developing country. Based on this estimation, the huge amount of capital that flew out from
Ethiopia could be more than enough to fund the construction of hundreds of hospitals, schools,
universities, roads, bridges and other social facilities for the destitute children of the proud
nation. Unfortunately, this illicit money has already absorbed by the western economy.

Given the scenarios discussed above, this article argues that intercountry adoption in Ethiopia
resembles an unregulated marketplace where children are the commodity. In the United States
and Western Europe, declining birth rates and the largest number of infertile couples in history
have created a situation where the demand for children exceeds the supply (Serrill, 1991). As a
result, the adoption business is driven by market forces instead of the best interest of the child.
Thus, the child market has become the main source of foreign currency for the government of
Ethiopia. On top of this, the cost of adopting a child is roughly twenty-six times the average
yearly income of an Ethiopian, thus monetary incentives underlie concerns regarding the

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recruitment of children from birth parents by adoption service providers (CCIA, 2014). More
recently, the government of Australia has closed its‟ intercountry adoption programme with
Ethiopia in 2012 for the same reason (AIHW, 2013). Furthermore, the government of Ethiopia
associated financial aid with the provision of children for intercountry adoption (Clair, 2012).

The most influential article of Graff (2010) stated that in the past five years, Ethiopia‟s adoptions
to the United States alone have expanded exponentially: Americans adopted [479] Ethiopian
children in 2005 and [2,446] in 2009, ranking Ethiopia right behind China as a source for our
international adoptions. The combination of skyrocketing numbers and troubling stories suggests
that Ethiopia has become the latest country beset by an all-too-common problem: a poor country
in which unscrupulous middlemen are sometimes buying, defrauding, coercing, or even
kidnapping children away from their families to be sold into international adoption. Another
study conducted by Arun Dohle in 2009, found that the adoption process [in Ethiopia] is riddled
by fraud and other clear-cut criminal activities. But most importantly, the demand-driven
intercountry adoption process is breaking up families who could be helped in building up their
lives with a fraction of the money involved in intercountry adoption. The same study confirmed
that agencies falsify documents of children with biological parents, in collaboration with
orphanages involved in illegal acts to show that they are abandoned and using these documents
to obtain final court decision for international adoption. Ethiopia's government found that some
children's paperwork had been doctored to list children who had been relinquished by living
parents as orphans instead, which allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures
(Jocy, 2011). There is a more serious adoption scandal that the government of Ethiopia was
asked to give clarification regarding the possibility of adopting conceived children before their
birth. This is an alarming call for the international community in general and stakeholders in
particular to investigate the most corrupted adoption system of the country.

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Table1: Intercountry Adoption from Ethiopia to 16 major receiving Countries 2004-2013
Years
Country 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Total
Australia 59 72 47 35 38 33 40 18 17 na 359
Belgium 62 53 88 124 144 143 120 147 92 69 1042
Canada 34 64 135 274 411 279 212 272 186 78 1945
Denmark 41 30 38 39 92 125 117 80 57 45 664
Finland 7 5 15 15 12 17 10 13 4 na 98
France 390 397 408 417 484 445 354 289 220 140 3544
Germany 22 21 33 30 50 73 99 64 na na 392
Ireland 16 13 14 17 26 21 75 42 32 26 282
Italy 193 221 227 256 338 348 274 233 296 297 2683
Malta na 24 21 15 9 5 na na na na 74
Netherlands 52 77 48 68 50 39 23 19 16 na 392
Norway 53 36 27 33 44 43 38 na 12 8 294
Spain 220 227 732 481 629 722 508 441 302 na 4262
Sweden 26 37 32 39 42 37 28 24 15 11 291
Switzerland 43 55 54 58 51 49 76 81 61 na 528
USA 289 479 807 1289 1808 2446 2511 1732 1567 993 13921
Total to all 1507 1811 2726 3190 4228 4825 4485 3455 2877 1667 30771
Sources: Based on data from Australian Inter-country Adoption Network (AICAN) and Hague Convention Statistics
Chart 1 Top Six Receiving Countries

Source: based on Table 1 above

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Table 2 Intercountry Adoption from Ethiopia to 15 major receiving countries 1994-2003
Country Years Total
1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Australia 3 6 16 41 34 46 37 46 53 45 327
Belgium 46 38 41 52 177
Canada1 15 13 15 43
Denmark 22 23 20 40 105
Finland 4 11 6 21
France 90 155 234 209 217 815
Germany 23 32 19 74
Ireland 7 2 4 13
Italy 9 79 112 47 247
Netherland 36 31 53 56 39 44 47 51 39 396
Norway 46 50 40 46 182
Spain 12 107 119
Sweden 15 17 18 21 71
Switzerland 25 31 58 114
USA 54 63 44 82 96 42 95 165 105 165 911
Total to All 57 105 91 176 396 127 259 773 750 881 3615
Sources: 1 International Adoption Statistics / Canada (Family Helper, www.familyhelper.net)

1.3. Trends of the Adoption industry

Statistics on intercountry adoption are notoriously difficult to find. Even planners and policy
makers didn‟t have direct access for them. Thus, data from selected receiving countries are used
to estimate the number of adopted children from Ethiopia. Table 1 above shows trends of
intercountry adoptions from Ethiopia to 16 receiving countries. The overall data presented for
these countries is more complete for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Sweden
and USA, whereas almost complete for Australia, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway,
Spain and Switzerland, but less complete for Malta. The total number of children received by all

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countries increased between 2004 and 2013. Nearly 90 percent go to the USA, France, Canada,
Belgium, Spain and Italy (Chart 1 below). Ethiopia is the only country of origin in which
intercountry adoptions have increased progressively since 2004 while there was progressive
decline in other countries such as china and Russia. International adoption costs also increased
from 20,000-36,507 US dollar over the same period of time.

In the last ten years, more than 30,000 international adoptions were finalized in Ethiopia with an
estimated cost of 8.6 billion US dollar. This makes Ethiopia, the second largest exporter of
children for international adoption next to China. Since the business of adoption has become so
lucrative, a number of western adoption agencies have shifted their destination from Guatemala
to Ethiopia. Even though, many African countries do not allow adoption agencies in the adoption
process there are more than 70 adoption agencies in Ethiopia that involved in the adoption
process. And these agencies are familiar with only one image of the country. They picture in
their mind and claim 5 million “manufactured orphans” to justify the need for intercountry
adoption. Almost all of these agencies promote for the adoption of healthy infants in their
websites. The majority of their websites displayed photographs of children and used terminology
that promoted children as a commodity rather than as individuals in need. For instance, one of
the US-based adoption agencies states on their website that children will be at least five months
old when they come home with their adoptive parents from Ethiopia (All God‟s Children
International Website, 2010). The representative of another US-based adoption agency explained
on an email communication with prospective clients, they might be able to adopt infants as
young as two months old because the agency were working with pregnant girls in Ethiopia. This
means that even though there are many children who grow up in public custodial institutions,
people prefer to adopt babies rather than these older children (Ezra, 2006). In this regard, Graff
(2008) revealed that many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy
children but to find children for Western homes.

1.4. Motives for Intercountry adoption

Intercountry adoption has brought a number of debatable issues. In order to understand these
debatable issues, it is inevitable to seek answers at least for some key questions such as: what are
the motives behind intercountry adoption? Does intercountry adoption give a child to a family or

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a family to a child? Whose interests are best served by intercountry adoption: those of the child,
those of the birth parents, those of the adoptive parents, or those of the state and other
organizations (Stuchtey, 2013)? Are there international legal regimes which regulate the process
of intercountry adoption? If so, why the government of Ethiopia hasn‟t ratified the 1993 Hague
Convention on intercountry adoption? What makes domestic adoption to decline in Ethiopia over
the past twenty years? What does an intercountry adoption means for Ethiopian birth parents? Do
they have detail information when they offer their children for intercountry adoption? What are
the political and ethical implications of intercountry adoption for the proud nation? And what
mechanisms are there to control corruption and anarchism in the adoption system of Ethiopia?
These are the most challenging issues surrounding the child adoption industry in Ethiopia and
elsewhere. Thus, this section of the article will explore these issues in an attempt to offer further
insight in to such questions.

Academic literatures on intercountry adoption have contributed to our understanding of the true
motives for child adoption. Bhabha (2004) stated that the commercially-fueled movement of
persons across borders dates back centuries to practices of slavery and indenture. In the 1950s,
intercountry adoption was considered as a humanitarian effort to deal with war orphans (Davis,
2011). But in recent years, adoptions differ from the humanitarian motives of rescuing war
orphans, or children from political and economic crises to more of a transfer of human resources
from poor countries to rich countries (Merino, 2010).What was started as a generous movement
with well-meaning motivation and intentions, has deteriorated into a capitalistic profit-making
venture in which babies are no more than the means of maximizing profits (Ezra, 2006).

More recently, Kislinger (2012) pointed out that in most Western nations, the number of healthy
infants available for domestic adoption has been steadily decreasing, due to a number of social
and economic factors including [delayed marriage], widespread use of birth control, an increased
number of abortions, and more options available to unwed mothers who want to keep their
children. For this reason, Shura (2009) argued that intercountry adoption is constructed in a way
that makes adults‟ wishes to become a parent and thus their demand for a child central to why
intercountry adoption exists. This suggests that intercountry adoption serves the best interest of
adoptive parents of rich countries at the expense of basic human rights of children in poor
countries.

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However, proponents of intercountry adoption such as Elizabeth Bartholet claimed that
intercountry adoption serves the fundamental need of some of the world‟s neediest children
(Barthole, 2005). Other prominent advocators of child adoption argued that international
adoption is one of the best and most logical solutions to the growing problem of orphaned
children in need of loving parents, and prospective parents who are in need of a child to love
(Nguyen, 2012; Hubing, 2001). More specifically, Wallace (2003) discussed that in the United
States and other western countries there are millions of families and individuals who desperately
want to adopt children [from other countries]. They also argued that any form of regulation that
requires children to stay in sending countries for a certain period of time, including certain
applications of the subsidiarity principle (Eijsink, 2011) should be removed to make the child
available for adoption. At this point, I am concerned by the fact that intercountry adoption seems
a new phase of modern-day slavery and colonization in which, children move from south to
north and from east to west as it was happened throughout the nineteenth century.

In the Ethiopian context, children are available for intercountry adoption mostly for commercial
reasons due to government corruption and national pride. The Schuster Institute for Investigative
Journalism (2012) reported that the adoption process in Ethiopia have shifted from “white” to
“gray”-that is from a well-regulated humanitarian effort dedicated to children‟s welfare, to a
business that is taking children away from their families in order to gain profits from Western
adoption fees. Jocy (2011) also noted that media investigations have found evidences that show
adoption agencies in Ethiopia had recruited children from intact families through frauds. For
instance, the Wall street Journal (WSJ, April 28, 2012) reported that Ethiopian birth parents
don‟t have adequate information when they relinquish their children for intercountry adoption.
Even the diminutive information that they have may be intentionally distorted by government
officials, adoption agencies, social workers and local child predators. Furthermore, Ethiopian
birth parents are confused of the term adoption with the usual domestic placement of children
within extended family members without legal termination of maternity. However, in Western
societies the term „adoption‟ is conventionally used for the transference of full parental rights
from birth to social parents, in contrast to fostering, in which only a partial transfer occurs
(Bowie, 2004).

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In general, the African Child Policy Forum (ACPF, 2013) indicated that Ethiopia does not have
comprehensive child law in the form of a Children‟s Act or Proclamation. In the absence of such
law, the 1994 Constitution of country, the Revised Family Code (RFC), the Criminal Code of
Ethiopia and the Labor Proclamation, remain the main instruments addressing issues pertaining
to children‟s rights in Ethiopia. These laws do not only cover a range of substantive child rights
related issues, but they also address, albeit inadequately, some relevant institutional frameworks
necessary for the full implementation and realization of children‟s rights in Ethiopia (ibid). On
top of this, even though Ethiopia has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the
African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, it has not ratified the more
comprehensive, and by all counts the more significant, Hague Convention on intercountry
adoption (Isanga, 2013). Thus, it essential to deal with legal issues in child adoption particularly
the 1993 Hague Convention to show that how the adoption industry in Ethiopia has been
suffering from corruption and anarchism over the past twenty years.

1.5. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption

The Hague Convention is the main international instrument that regulates intercountry adoption.
It established that all the participating countries must have a central authority as the source of
information and the contact in that country for all matters of child circulation. The main goals of
this convention were to prevent the abduction and sale or traffic of children. It also recognized
that, “intercountry adoption may offer the advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a
suitable family cannot be found in his or her country of origin” (HCCH, 2012). This convention
stipulated that in order for a child to be adopted internationally the child must have been deemed
as available for adoption in their country of origin following an effort to find an adoptive family
in their own country. It also stipulates that only adoption agencies that have been accredited on
the federal level will be recognized. In addition, all fees and estimated expenses must be released
to the adoptive parents beforehand and they cannot be charged extra except under certain
circumstances. The accreditation process and the inability for the agencies to charge extra at the
end, ensure that no illegal activities or exchanges of money are being made. Finally, it states that
every child that is adopted from a country who agreed to this convention should receive a Hague
Adoption Certificate or a Hague Custody Declaration. This assures the adoptive family that their

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child was adopted in a manner that was ethical and followed all the protocol set up by the Hague
Convention. Currently, there are 88 countries that are considered as convention countries.
Unfortunately, Ethiopia isn‟t party to this convention for the past twenty years. Therefore, I
dedicated this article, for those destitute children born in Ethiopia but adopted abroad without
formal procedure.

1.6. Conclusions and Further Research

In this article, a successful attempt has been made to assess the overall performances of the
adoption industry in Ethiopia. The results of the study revealed that the adoption process of the
country is coupled with corruption and anarchism. It serves as the main source of foreign
currency for the dictatorial regime in Ethiopia, instead of the best interests of the child. There is
no mechanism to control the selling and buying of children in the name of adoption. This
indicates that failures of the regime in power even to provide minimum care for the destitute
children of the proud nation. Furthermore, the demand-driven intercountry adoption process is
breaking up families who could be helped in building up their lives with a fraction of the money
involved in intercountry adoption. Under no circumstances should intercountry adoptions come
to break up existing family bonds solely to meet the Western world‟s increasing demand for
adoptable children nor should prospective adopters make use of their privileged financial
situations (Tadler, 2010). The author of this article strongly believes that it is an alarming call for
receiving countries and international human rights organization to alleviate commodification of
the destitute children of Ethiopia. This article will be an insight for researchers, planners and
policymakers for further investigation in order to protect the best interests of children in
Ethiopia.

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