Parents accuse Sierra Leone charity of forced adoptions

Parents in Sierra Leone claim a charity set up to help orphaned children has sent more than 30 children abroad for adoption without consent during the country's civil war. Several parents have no idea what happened to their children after they were handed over to Help a Needy Child International (Hanci), a charity started in 1994 to provide shelter and care for children orphaned by the war. A group of parents have been lobbying the government for years to find out what happened to their children.But the Sierra Leonean charity says it has official papers signed by the parents giving permission for their children to be sent abroad for adoption.

The west African country was devastated by a decade of civil war, which ended in 2002 during which thousands of children were orphaned and many abducted and forced to fight in the brutal conflict. Several years on, thousands of children have been left without families as the country still struggles to rebuild. Now frustrated at what they see as a lack of action by the country’s government, the parents have taken their campaign to the media. One mother told how she agreed to let Hanci care for and educate her children at a local centre to save them from the war.
"We regularly visited our children at the centre until some time in 1998 when we stopped seeing them," she said. "We went to Freetown to find out what had happened, and we were told they had sent our children overseas and they would be visiting us every five years,” she told a BBC correspondent. "We want the government to intervene and let us have our children back."And the parents of about 30 more children are making similar claims.

Hanci’s director Roland Kargbo has denied the accusations, saying the charity obtained written consent from the parents whose children were sent overseas. "There were two agreements - one for children to be cared for and reintegrated into the community locally, and another for parents who wanted their children to be adopted," he told the broadcaster."The parents know that, we have documents to support that."The government is still investigating the issue. "It is a convoluted story because so many years have elapsed so I have to take my time to look at it very carefully," said Soccoh Kabbia, Minister of Children's Affairs.The children are believed to have been adopted by American families

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children