By Arlene Zlotnick
Impilo, a designated child protection organisation with adoption accreditation for national and inter-country adoptions, places children in temporary safe care whilst carrying out intensive social work and child protection services, so that children can be placed in a permanent family environment as early as possible after removal. Registered as a Non-Profit Organisation (055-213-NPO), Non-Profit Company (NPC-2003/012123/08) and Public Benefit Organisation (PBO – 930005449), we provide services in the Gauteng region to approximately 150 children at any given time who are orphaned, vulnerable or abandoned. Typically, 13% to 19% of children cared for in a year will be refugees or asylum-seekers. We provide services to children up to 18 years old; however, 90% of the children we serve are under 6 years of age.
Services are provided from our head office in Fairvale Johannesburg, which houses the administrative staff and our Mpepu project, which facilitates our temporary safe care work that caters for 12 children. It has a beautiful garden and safe play area. We have regional offices in Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni (Benoni) and Sedibeng. Sedibeng was opened in 2011 due to the overwhelming need in this area and a lack of services. Additionally, 135 children at any given time are placed within our safe bed network (within nine partnering facilities).
We believe that children should be raised in a family environment in which they can thrive, and therefore we strive to keep children in families and avoid removal where appropriate, and return children to their family as quickly as possible after removal or find an alternative family, ie adoption. The family of origin is always the first option for a child’s placement, and alternative placement is considered and pursued only if this is not viable. 95% of our children are placed in a family environment within two years, and because of careful screening and monitoring, 98% of these placements are successful.
The word Impilo means “to give life” in Zulu.
Goal
To provide pre-statutory and statutory child protection and adoption services and build capacity in order to ensure that at-risk children in South Africa live in a safe, permanent home within a family they call their own.
Mission
To care for and protect orphaned, vulnerable and abandoned children by providing professional services guided by the underlying principle that the child’s best interests be served. We aim to strengthen, protect, preserve and build families in order to achieve our objective of providing children in our care with families. We aim to provide early intervention services to both parents and vulnerable children, and strive to empower mothers to care for their children within their families and communities.
Organisational objectives
- To act as early and as quickly as possible to deliver child protection interventions to parents and children who are orphaned, vulnerable and/or abandoned
- To empower parents to care for their children within their families and communities
- To find suitable alternative families for children who cannot be cared for in their families of origin
- To engage with communities to build capacity regarding child protection and adoption.
Why our services are urgently required
In South Africa, despite having one of the most comprehensive and progressive child protection statutory frameworks in the world, there are a number of serious and long-standing issues:
- inadequate prevention and early intervention and other statutory services, including protection, therapeutic services and prosecution of offenders
- poor quality and inappropriate duration of alternative residential care
- inadequate protection for especially vulnerable groups – notably unaccompanied or separated refugee children with disabilities
- insufficient human and financial resources
- weak institutional and accountability mechanisms.
