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Children’s homes in the Philippines
Not every child in the Philippines is able to grow up with their biological family. The loss of parents, neglect, abuse or extreme poverty mean that some children are placed, at least temporarily, in a children’s home or children’s village. For these children, such a facility often represents the first safe place they have known for a long time, where regular meals, medical care and school attendance are no longer taken for granted but must be actively organised. The following section looks at how such facilities are organised, how modern children’s villages differ from traditional children’s homes, and what the future often holds for the children involved.
How are children’s homes organised in the Philippines?
In the Philippines, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is primarily responsible for overseeing childcare facilities. Among other things, this government agency is responsible for licensing children’s homes and is tasked with ensuring that minimum standards for accommodation, care and child protection are met. The government’s work is supplemented by the Council for the Welfare of Children, as well as by numerous private and church-run aid organisations that operate their own facilities.
The role of government oversight
In practice, however, public authorities often reach their limits. In large cities in particular, many facilities are overstretched in terms of both staff and funding, whilst poorer or remote regions often lack the necessary infrastructure altogether. It is precisely this gap that numerous private and church-run organisations aim to fill; they create additional places and must work closely with the public authorities in order to obtain and retain their licences. Such licensing usually requires regular inspections, including checks on hygiene, staff qualifications and the actual quality of care provided on site.
How do modern children’s villages differ from traditional care homes?
Over the past few decades, our understanding of how children without families of their own should best be brought up has changed significantly. Instead of large, impersonal collective accommodation facilities, many organisations now opt for smaller, family-like structures.
Small residential groups instead of large institutions
Typical features of modern children’s villages in the Philippines include, amongst others:
- Accommodation is spread across several smaller residential blocks rather than a single large building
- Dedicated carers, often referred to as house mothers, who provide long-term support for a group of children
- Siblings are accommodated together in the same residential group wherever possible
- Regular attendance at local schools rather than a purely boarding-school-style structure within the facility
One example of this is a German children’s village on the island of Leyte, which has been in existence since 1986 and houses around 70 babies, toddlers and young people in eight residential homes, together with their house mothers and social workers. Larger international organisations are now also consistently adopting this model, for example by placing several hundred children in individual family-style homes rather than in a single large central facility. Often, separate nurseries, schools or medical centres are established around such children’s villages, benefiting not only the children in the facility itself but also families from the surrounding community.
How do children end up in a children’s home, and what happens next?
The journey to a children’s home is rarely a voluntary one. Often, social workers, neighbours or local authorities place children in a facility after an acute emergency has been identified – for example, if parents have died, abandoned their children, or if the child’s own family can simply no longer provide a safe environment. In some cases, children are also taken from the streets and placed in a care home when social workers determine that a child is at immediate risk and no longer has a safe family home to turn to.
Several factors play an important role in a child’s subsequent development within the care home:
- Assessing whether a return to the child’s own family is possible and safe in the medium or long term
- Finding a suitable foster family if a return is not an option
- Ongoing educational support to ensure good prospects for the future despite the difficult circumstances
- Support with the transition to independent living upon reaching the age of majority
- Regular meetings with social workers to monitor each child’s personal development
Many children’s villages in the Philippines do not see themselves as a permanent solution, but rather as a temporary arrangement that offers children in acute distress a safe home until a better solution – one that is as close to a family environment as possible – can be found. For some organisations, young people who are attending secondary school or starting vocational training also move into their own youth residential groups, where they are gradually given more responsibility before they are fully independent.
Children’s homes and children’s villages in the Philippines thus fulfil an important role within a system that is reaching the limits of its capacity in many areas. Where state structures alone are insufficient, private and church-run organisations provide additional places, often organised along family-like lines, which offer the children concerned stability, schooling and a reliable caregiver, at least for a certain period, until a more permanent solution can be found for them. For orphans in the Philippines in particular – who have neither parents nor other relatives willing to take them in – such facilities often represent the only realistic chance of growing up in a stable and safe environment, rather than being left to fend for themselves.