Cambodia’s invisible children: Government ‘unaware’ of half of orphanages
ORPHANAGES in Cambodia are often operated without government’s knowledge and therefore tens of thousands of children are invisible to the system. More than half of residential child care centers in Cambodia are unregistered and completely off government’s radar according to a new report by the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation (MoSVY) and UNICEF Cambodia.
The report, released last week, mapped residential child care facilities in five high priority provinces – Phnom Penh, Siem Reap, Battambang, Kandal and Preah Sihanouk. The results were astonishing. There were 56 percent more children in orphanages than previously estimated by the Cambodian government. The reason for the loophole is simple – authorities previously only counted statistics for registered child care facilities. It turns out, half of them have never registered and the children they care for are unaccounted for by the authorities.
In the five mapped provinces, a total of 26,159 young people were found to be living in 401 child care institutions. Those included 267 institutional care centers, 134 informal facilities, such as group homes, boarding schools, pagodas, transitional homes and forms of emergency accommodation. Roughly two-thirds of the youth in all the institutions were under the age of 18.
Concerns include overcrowding, exploitation, deliberately poor conditions to attract donors funding.
The report says that in the five provinces researched, 139 residential care institutions were registered and known to the Ministry of Social Affairs. Those had been inspected back in 2014. But the mapping also identified additional 267 residential care institutions, whose existence the government was not aware of. This is a 92 percent increase, report says.
