More than 3,000 Croatian children are currently staying cared for by foster families or group homes, with little over 400 of them meet the requirements to be put up for adoption, whereas the number of potential adoptive families stands at over 1,300, said Adopta, an association providing support to adopters, at its recent panel.

Speakers invited to take part in the conference spoke about problems and challenges people wishing to adopt children or provide foster care face in Croatia, which is notorious for its complicated red tape and long waiting periods for would-be adopters.

From January to October this year, only 85 children have been adopted, while throughout the whole of 2017 there were 126 adoptions in the country. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 children have been temporarily placed in foster families or group homes. However, only 413 of them having the paperwork needed to be put up for adoption, with some 1,300 potential adopters registered.

“These numbers show that a family could be found for each and every of those children,” said head of Adopta, Andreja Turcin.

Turcin said that improving the national adoption rates required faster legal procedures to remove children from custody of unfit parents, and introducing incentives for adopting more than one child – especially for children who have difficulties getting adopted, like older children, ethnic minority children, or children with developmental difficulties.

She also called for the 2016 protocol devised by the Ministry of Social Policy to be more efficiently implemented in practice. The protocol says that for every child who is not paired with a foster family within the first three months since entering the system, the state-run social care centres are obliged to create an anonymous profile on a protected adoption website. However, there are currently only 40 such profiles on the website.

On October 31, the government had sent to parliament a bill on foster parenting which legally treats foster care as a full-time job for unemployed foster parents, and also provides for specialised foster care for children with special needs, both to be financed by the state budget.

The Minister for Social Welfare, Nada Murganic, said at the time that the bill had been prepared in a bid to improve and encourage foster parenting, given that there are currently not enough foster families, and that those who are registered are unevenly distributed across the country.

The proposal includes raising the funding for foster care by an additional 15.5 million kuna (€2 million), to a total of 228.5 million kuna (€31.7 million), including 183 million kuna (24.6 million) earmarked to go to children in foster care, and 45.5 million kuna (€6.1 million) in remuneration fees paid to carers.

The range of monthly wages paid out to foster parents is set to from 2,500 kuna (€336) to 6,500 kuna (€875) with the higher amounts granted to foster parents who care for children with special needs.

(€1 = 7.43 kuna)

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