Why South Africa’s challenges make care reform urgent — not optional
South Africa’s commitment to end the institutionalisation of children by 2030 has sparked important public debates. The recent opinion piece on “For The Voices” and “Timeslive” has pointed to widespread poverty, gender-based violence, social worker shortages, and an overstretched foster care system as reasons for concern. These realities are not in dispute. They are, in fact, the very reasons why care reform is necessary.
Institutional care has become a default response to deep systemic failures. Children are often removed from families not because they are unsafe, but because families lack access to support, disability services, income security, or early intervention. While Child and Youth Care Centres play an important role as a last resort, decades of local and global evidence show that institutional settings cannot provide the consistent, responsive caregiving children need to thrive, particularly in early childhood.
Care reform does not deny the scale of South Africa’s social challenges, nor does it propose the abrupt removal of the protection for vulnerable children. The reform agenda commits to a sequenced transition: strengthening families, expanding promotive and preventative services, improving family-based alternative care, increasing temporary safe care, reunification, and ensuring strong coordination, monitoring, and accountability.
Concerns about capacity, especially within foster care, are valid. But they should not be used to defending a system that is already buckling under pressure. Institutional care has not solved social worker shortages, prevention of abandonment, or reduced the number of children entering the child protection system. It has often entrenched separation and long-term developmental harm.
The 2030 timeline is not a denial of complexity; it is a recognition of urgency. Every year of delay means thousands more children are spending critical developmental years without the nurturing care they need. Reform is not about removing children from protection; it is ensuring that protection does not come at the cost of their long-term wellbeing.
Ultimately, the goal of care reform is not to dismantle safety nets, but to ensure that children are supported within families and communities wherever possible, and that removal remains a true last resort. In keeping with the indivisibility of child rights, best practice and the best interest of the child-at-risk, temporary placements should be in family-based care options, while targeted and comprehensive work is done with both the child and the family of origin, to enable reunification. The question is not whether the system is ready. The question is how long children should wait for a system that works for them.
Care reform is complex and must be implemented carefully. But complexity is not an argument for inaction. It is a call for leadership, investment, coordination, and accountability, all of which the Care Reform Summit 2025 committed to advancing.