After eight years, Kenya reopens to international adoptions. President Uhuru Kenyatta signed the Child Protection and Care Act into law, which now comes into force, three weeks before the national elections and the end of his term.
Before coming under the President's pen, the Act had been finally passed by the Parliament and the Senate of the Republic.
In fact, the 20-year moratorium on international adoptions that had been introduced by the Chamber of Deputies in 2014, as demanded by civil society and several international associations over the years, is cancelled.
One of these associations that is very active in Kenya is AIBI (Amici dei Bambini), whose president Marco Griffini commented with satisfaction on the results of the efforts expended during the Kenyatta administration's 'white semester' during which many laws suffer a physiological slowdown.
"This lifting of the moratorium is an important result achieved thanks to the commitment on the ground of AiBi and other local and international civil society organisations," commented Marco Griffini. "AiBi has remained in the country over these years, doing international cooperation: taking in street children, the right to education in the slums. The country has done a lot of work on deinstitutionalisation in recent years, but the numbers of children outside the family and adoptable are still very high. We used to do a dozen adoptions a year, when after the election of the new president, Kenya will decide on how to make the law operational, we are ready to become operational again even with respect to international adoptions. We will work to ensure that this fundamental law does not remain only on paper but really gives thousands of abandoned children the concrete chance to be adopted and find a family in which they can grow up in serenity".