Romania
The Governmental Strategy
Although the main objective of the Governmental Strategy on child protection is the reduction of the number of children living in residential institutions, this is still a delicate issue for the field of child protection.
Currently, there are 4.770.000 children in Romania, out of who 0.55% live in residential institutions (21.847 children in state institutions and 4.752 children in institutions belonging to non-governmental organizations). After 1997, the number of children in substitute families has been considerably increasing, reaching 47.194 children in March 2007. Out of them, almost 8.6% were taken care of by the extended family, more than 42% by professional foster caregivers and approximately 49.4% by other persons or families. Until the moratorium on banning international adoptions was adopted in October 2001, they represented 70.16% of the total adoptions (in 2000).
Despite all the efforts to close down the big residential institutions and to offer family-type alternatives to children whose parents do not take care of them, the number of children who are entering this system is still high, the main reason for institutionalization being poverty, which worsens the other problems that families confront with (parents' lack of education and experience, unemployment, chronic diseases, alcoholism etc.).
Source: National Authority for Protecting Children's Rights