ABSTRACT
In 2012, the African Child Policy Forum released a report entitled Africa: The New Frontier for Intercountry Adoption and identified that from 2003 to 2010 the practice of international adoptions of African children had increased “three fold” in that short time span (African Child Policy Forum, 2012, iii). The report was the result of a child-policy conference that convened in Ethiopia and deliberated on the topic of child adoption; guidelines for child adoption were drawn up to ensure that the best interests of the child were paramount in the continent’s surge in intercountry adoption (Fifth International Policy Conference on the African Child, 2012). Because many African countries have not signed the Hague Convention on Intercountry
Adoption (Mezmur, 2010; Provost, 2013), the guidelines generated at this forum were an important step towards a unified stance on the adoption activities across the continent of 55 countries. Learning from the past, including a history of international adoption problems and illicit practices in the region (Mezmur, 2010), and with the commitment to the prevention of future illicit activities, the forum made recommendations for when states should not allow intercountry adoption, as follows:
• When a state does not provide the basic minimum substantive and institutional safeguards necessary to promote a child’s best interests in the context of intercountry adoption.
