It’s their culture. but even culturally, ethiopians

It’s believed that American families have adopted more than 5, 500 Ethiopian children since 2011, according to the United States embassy. And even with Ethiopia being such a large adoption hub, it’s also known for its corrupt adoption system. There have been many allegations made in the past about the adoption facility’s putting forth children to be adopted that weren’t orphans, this would sometimes be called “ child harvesting”,  and a lot of the time with these cases the parents would not be able to afford helping their children and giving them the best they could so these fraudulent agencies would make these parents in need believe that the program would be like “ abroad schooling” where they would still see their children but little did they know that these agencies would create fraudulent papers saying that the child’s parents were dead, that the child was an orphan, and would go about being “ an adoption agency” to some other family and would send off the child to a different country.

And when this was discovered it promoted embassies to put forth new and stricter regulations in adoption. It even caused Denmark back in 2016 to ban adoptions from Ethiopia, because they believed that the agencies gave off information that was consistently inconsistent. And yet there was a policy put into place banning international adoption because they would rather these children to be adopted in the country of their birth, where the Ethiopian government can “ protect them”, where they can be surrounded by their “ people”, and with their culture. But even culturally, Ethiopians aren’t known for adopting children; usually, children when they lose their main caregivers, the next of kin take the children and raise them.

But it’s not common for citizens to adopt orphans. Which is why I’m very spectacle on the reasoning behind this ban, MPs have said that orphans and other vulnerable children should be supported by the local system in order to protect them from abuse from outside of their country. But I believe that the children’s needs will not be met by the services in Ethiopia, which is why international adoption laws were put in place in the beginning.