Haiti has one of the highest concentrations of orphanages per capita in the world, a fact that child protection experts point to not as evidence of need being met but as evidence of a system badly in need of reform. Research conducted by UNICEF and other organizations found that the vast majority of children in Haitian orphanages — estimated at 80 percent or more — had at least one living parent, meaning they were not orphans in any meaningful sense but had been placed in institutional care because of poverty.
This finding pointed to a profound dysfunction in which well-intentioned international donations to orphanages were inadvertently incentivizing family separation, rather than supporting families to remain together and care for their own children. In some documented cases, the orphanage sector had created perverse incentives for the recruitment and even exploitation of children.
Child welfare organizations had been working for years to transition Haiti from an orphanage-based child welfare model to one centered on family preservation and community-based care, with institutionalization reserved for the rare cases in which no family option was available. Progress had been made in some areas, but the sector remained difficult to reform given the variety of operators and the flow of international funding.
The political and economic crisis of 2019 added new urgency to the issue. As family economic stress increased, pressure on parents to place children in institutional care also increased. Child protection advocates called for emergency family support programs to prevent crisis-driven family separations.