Kyrgyzstan Without Orphans Conference

Starts:	Friday, September 19, 2014	All day
Ends:	Saturday, September 20, 2014

 

September will be the launch of an event never before held in Kyrgyzstan – a focus on the orphans and what can be done to bring families to orphans – Kyrgyz families who will love, nurture and grow a child to become all they are made to be. The tides are turning in Kyrgyzstan with new laws for fostering and a new openness for adoption.

The Kyrgyzstan Without Orphans Conference will give key leaders insight into the orphan care movement and how to make a difference one child – one family at a time. With over 11,000 children who need homes, the task is large in a country where poverty is the norm for more than 36 percent of the population.

The conference, hosted by World Without Orphans will have speakers from several countries along with national leaders from Kyrgyzstan. Speaking for World Without Orphans will be Ruslan Maliuta who has been leading the orphan care visioning around the world. Additionally, Sergey Demodovich from Ukraine, Tri Budiardjo from South East Asia and with Compassion International, David Hennessey from the USA and with CAFO, and Lynn Johnston from Canada and with LAMb International.

Persons wanting to register for the conference can contact the following people by email: Zukra or Anna Savinyh

DATA FROM EURASIANET.ORG: According to research conducted by My Family, a UNICEF-funded NGO in Bishkek, today over 11,000 children live in Kyrgyzstan’s 117 children’s homes, sometimes referred to as orphanages. Most are admitted for one of three reasons: the death of a parent (22 percent); a family’s difficult financial situation (21 percent); or divorce (14 percent). Only 6 percent have no living parents.Though Kyrgyz families, according to Baisalov, adopted over 1,000 kids in 2010 and as many in 2011, My Family says the number of institutionalized children is increasing with Kyrgyzstan’s worsening poverty. The Kyrgyz National Statistics Committee reports that 36.8 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2011, an increase of 3.1 percent over the previous year.

Poverty is what’s driving the labor migration. By many estimates, 800,000 Kyrgyz — or about 15 percent of the country’s population — are working abroad in Russia and Kazakhstan, mostly doing menial labor like shoveling snow in Moscow or cleaning up in fast-food restaurants. According to the World Bank, in 2011, the last year for which statistics are available, remittances totaled the equivalent of 29 percent of GDP, making Kyrgyzstan the third-most remittance-dependent country in the world.