The two most critical questions related to foster care in South Africa are: how many children will be affected when the High Court moratorium on the lapsing of foster care orders ends in November 2019, and, is the Department of Social Development able to solve the long-term crisis that may ensue?
Slides from the presentation revealed that 128,383 foster care orders were due to expire in November 2019, and a further 8,471 over December 2019. These figures are alarming. But they were an improvement on those reported to the Centre for Child Law in a 23 August update . To make things more bewildering, when the provinces gave individual updates at the portfolio committee briefing, their numbers were again markedly different . Only six of the provinces were represented at the briefing , so it is hard to tell what the actual numbers would have been.
If that wasn’t confusing enough, on 11 September, in the week between the two portfolio committee briefings, the deputy minister for social development answered a question in Parliament about the number of foster care orders that will likely have expired by December 2019 with the figure of 8,280. It is possible that she misinterpreted the question or that she believes that the November backlog will be cleared and only the December one will be a problem.
On the positive side, the department certainly has made progress towards addressing the foster care orders due to lapse in November, progress that it strongly feels should be acknowledged.its article reporting concerns raised about foster care The spokesperson did make some valid points, however. The department has been quite creative in some of its solutions for addressing the backlog, including approaching Treasury to use half theThe result has been the employment of an additional 566 social workers to combat backlogs. Other provinces have also used savings to employ an extra 200 social workers.
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