ABSTRACT

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, “family” is broadly conceptualized and includes relatives beyond biological mother, father, and siblings who share in responsibility for the care of children through to adulthood (Oni, 1995). Despite this widespread acceptance of collective childrearing and fostering, in Uganda, where communities have traditionally relied on extended family structures to care for orphaned children, factors such as size of family, age and gender of the children, number of losses in the family, and economic status of the caregivers have shifted this traditional responsibility (Chirwa, 2002). The first cases of child-headed households (CHHs), typically defined as children 17 and under who have lost both parents and are living on their own, were identified in the late 1980s in Uganda’s Rakai District (Foster & Makufa, 1997). Although there are no official numbers, among this district’s population of approximately 470,000, we estimate that children head over 1,000 households. These numbers suggest that child-headed families are not a short-term emergency that can be resolved with a one-time injection of resources (Plan Finland, 2005) but, rather, a new reality for families and communities operating at the limits of their resources.