Incentives

Yesterday night before going to sleep me, Jenny and Sonia were talking and Jenny shared something she read somewhere.

Apparently orphanages here in Ghana are not working that well. Actually it’s more how well they are serving its purpose.

What happens is that orphanages have better living conditions that some families. This means that some kids end up going to there because their parents put them there because they know their kids will have a better life there than at home.

This must cause a lot of problems for society: kids end up not growing up with their families when they actually had that opportunity; management for the orphanages might be harder; kids who are actually orphans might end up not going there because they are full with kids that are not actually orphans – this is just me drawing conclusions out of this fact.

So this would only stop happening when the living conditions at home are at least as good as the living conditions in orphanages. At this point there are no more incentives for a mother to put her son in an orphanage. But for what I’ve understood there is a long way to go before they get to that point.

So some questions arise out of this situation: should they close the orphanages because it’s not serving who it’s supposed to be serving? That should not happen because real orphans would have no option. But then how can they maximize their efficiency – how to ensure that their resources are actually being invested in real orphans? How can they ensure that they actually receive only real orphans? How to get a proof that a kid is actually an orphan?

21/07/2012