The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has given USD300,000 for a child adoption programme in Vietnam.

Children at SOS Village in Hanoi

The programme called Strengthening Legislation and Monitoring Systems for Child Adoption, run by UNICEF, will be implemented between 2011 and 2013.

The USAID’s grant will help improve the country’s current legal and regulatory framework to bring it in line with international standards to better protect children who lack parental care. It will support the establishment of a national monitoring system for child adoption and pilot the implementation of new alternative care models, including foster care.

The French National Committee for UNICEF has also made a donation of USD700,000 to the programme.

Lotta Sylwander, UNICEF’s Vietnam representative, said the organisation will give further assistance to Vietnam’s comprehensive child protection activities, in hopes that the Government will soon ratify the Hague Convention, and put into action its principles regarding inter-country adoption included in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

As of the late 1990s, Vietnam was ranked among the most popular countries for international child adoption, with at least 10,000 Vietnamese children having been placed in homes worldwide in the last decade.

According to the Adoption System in Vietnam by International Social Services (ISS), which was commissioned by UNICEF and the Ministry of Justice in 2009, adoptions from Vietnam have been on the increase in recent years (from 1,183 cases in 2002 to 1,658 in 2008).

However, Vietnam still lacks an appropriate monitoring system for both orphaned and adopted children. Family-based alternative care models, which could provide temporary or permanent homes are also limited.

Since 2008, the Government has engaged in reforms to its adoption system. A new national Law on Adoption was enacted in June 2010, along with a decree which will guide its implementation from March this year.

The country also took part in the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation with Respect to Inter-country Adoption in December 2010. Under the convention, Vietnam must ensure that adoption is authorised only by competent authorities, and that inter-country adoptions enjoy the same safeguards and standards which apply to the national adoption processes.

Inter-country adoption is only used when no permanent domestic family placement alternative is available, and it is not allowed to result from promised or real financial gain for those involved.