Journal of Social Development in Africa (1993), 8,2,11-22 
Reuniting Unaccompanied Children and 
Families in Mozambique: An Effort to Link 
Networks of Community Volunteers to a 
National Programme 
NEIL BOOTHBY* 
ABSTRACT 
This article describes Mozambique's effort to respond to the needs of one group 
of vulnerable children: children who have been separated from their families as a 
result of the current emergency. It begins with a brief overview of Mozambique's 
policy for "unaccompanied children", a term used to underscore the fact that most 
of these children have been separated from parents and extended families and are 
not orphans per se. It examines initial efforts to implement this policy through the 
development of a national tracing and foster care programme, and subsequent 
attempts to link these national responses to networks of community volunteers 
throughout the countryside. Mozambique's experience is discussed in the light of 
its potential to inform programme development for unaccompanied children in 
other war-affected countries. 
Introduction 
The UNEconomic Commission for Africa estimates that between 1980 - 88 at least 
900,000 people died in Mozambique because of destabilisation (ECA, 1989). The 
situation has only recendy improved following the recent peace accord between 
FRELIMOandRENAMO and, in fact, RENAMO stepped-up attacks in many 
parts of Mozambique in the early period after the agreement in order to continue 
to negotiate from a position of strength. 
Children have been especially vulnerable to the effects of RENAMO terror. 
UNICEF believes that between 1980-88 there were 494,000 destablisation-related 
deaths of children under the age of five years (UNICEF, 1989). Children who 
survive RENAMO attacks also face a range of traumatic experiences. A recent 
study of over 500 children in 49 war-affected districts throughout Mozambique 
* Professor, Department of Social Policy, Duke University, North Carolina, USA.
12 NeUBoothby 
indicated that the majority of these children had witnessed murder (77%), rape 
(63%) and torture (88%) of civilians (Boothby, Upton, and Sultan, 1991), and 
FRELIMO reported that: 
"200,000 children either do not know the whereabouts of their parents or have 
suffered the terrible trauma of watching their execution or their death". 
(FRELIMO, 1989). 
Due to chronic food shortages, thousands of children have been malnourished 
during their critical early years and could be permanently stunted, both physically 
and mentally. Thousands have never been vaccinated and are likely to succumb to 
diseases that could be prevented by EPI programmes. The combination of war, 
famine and massive displacements have placed Mozambican children at grave 
risk, often overwhelming the capacities of the government and the international 
relief community to respond to their need for food, protection, shelter, and medical 
attention. 
Initial Responses to Unaccompanied Children 
Since 1985, the Government of Mozambique has addressed the matter of 
unaccompanied children through its "Children in Difficult Circumstances" policy. 
The policy argues that the best interests of unaccompanied children dictate that 
they be reunited with parents or extended family members as a matter of urgency. 
If reunification with parents or extended family does not prove to be feasible, then 
placementoftheunaccompaniedchndinafosterfamily is considered to be the next 
best option. The use of orphanages, on the other hand, is to be avoided whenever 
possible. All institutional forms of child care are viewed as placement options of 
last resort 
The National Directorate of Social Action (DNAS), the nation's child welfare 
agency, originally housed within the Ministry of Health, was charged with 
responsibility for implementing the government's policy for unaccompanied 
children. With assistance from UNICEF and Save the Children Fund (UK), DNAS 
drew up plans for a family tracing and reunification programme. It also piloted 
several programmes to stimulate foster family placements for unaccompanied 
children in parts of rural Mozambique. 
Neither of these mid-1980s efforts to implement Mozambique's policy proved 
capable of providing meaningful assistance to unaccompanied children. Part of the 
problem was that DNAS was snared in the hierarchal structures and centralised
Reuniting Unaccompanied Children 13 
orientation of the Ministry of Health and was never able to develop the capacity or 
the flexibility needed to work in the countryside, where drought, malnutrition and 
starvation had exacerbated the conditions caused by RENAMO's brutal war. 
While DNAS had placed staff in all ten provincial capitals, only a few social 
welfare agents worked in district level positions where the vast majority of 
displaced people (deslocados) live. Given that most of the countryside is only 
reachable by air, not by road, DNAS was not in a position to mobilise the kind of 
community-based action needed to facilitate a massive tracing effort. By 1988, less 
than 100 unaccompanied children had been reunified with their families through 
DNAS' tracing programme. The centrally planned foster care programme also 
failed to build upon community traditions. Matrilineal and patrilineal peoples 
have, at a most basic level, different ways of perceiving kinship which may entail 
different placement choices in cases where a child's mother and father are not 
available. These and other diverse cultural practices among distinct ethnic and 
linguistic groups in the North and the South regions of Mozambique were ignored. 
As a result, numerous examples emerged of children who had been subjected to 
material and emotional neglect in some foster families and, at the extreme, cases 
of abuse were reported, some of which resulted in fostered children running away. 
Anotherproblem involved theprogramme'seffort to providematerial assistance 
to families who expressed a willingness to care for unaccompanied children. While 
the need for material assistance was evident, its linkage to a foster care programme 
in deslocado communities where the vast majority of residents were destitute had 
anegative impact on both thechildandthecommunity. Because DNAS' programme 
was implemented outside of local community structures, there was no strong 
kinship tie and thus no strong emotive link between the fostered child and the foster 
family and, often, the fostered child was the last "family member" to receive the 
food, clothing, and other assistance used to stimulate these placements. To counter 
this tendency, social workers began to insist that material assistance be given 
directly to the fostered child and not shared with other children in the family. This 
approach only made matters worse as the special attention paid to the fostered child 
did not facilitate genuine integration within the family. 
Finally, the DNAS foster care programme tended to undermine traditional child 
welfare responses in the deslocado communities in which it was implemented. 
Even in peaceful times, it is not unusual in Mozambique to have children reside 
with adults from their extended families or wider clans, and throughout the war the 
vast majority of the country's unaccompanied children have been provided family 
care through these spontaneous kinship responses. With the introduction of
14 NeUBoothby 
DNAS'material assistance-foster careprogramme,however,anumberof traditional 
adult caretakers wanted to be compensated, as non-traditional caretakers, for 
meeting what before they had perceived as a communal obligation. These tensions 
often exacerbated the pressures already faced by both the child and the traditional 
caretaker and created new rifts between traditional and DNAS-supported foster 
families within deslocado communities selected for DNAS programmes. 
The Lhanguene Initiative 
By 1988 Mozambican child welfare advocates were raising questions about the 
efficacy of the nation's response to unaccompanied children. DNAS' National 
Director was one of the harshest critics: 
"We were thwarted by the Ministry of Health and its unresponsive bureaucracy, 
and by the lack of commitment on the part ofUNICEF and the NGOs 
to work together on programmes for unaccompanied children. It was not a 
high priority for them and we [DNAS] just did not have the human or 
financial resources, transportation, logistical system, or the technical 
expertise to make the programme work on our own...[Another problem] 
was that as an agency we had not learned how to work with the people in 
the communities". 
(Mangueria, 1990). 
DNAS' inability to launch a sustainable tracing effort, or to work through 
community structures to place and follow-up on unaccompanied child in foster 
families, dictated that new approaches be developed and other players become 
involved. 
The effort to re-think Mozambique's response to unaccompanied children took 
place aspartof me "Lhanguene Initiative'' which was organised in 1988 by DNAS, 
the Department of Special Education, Save the Children Fund (UK), and Save the 
Children Federation (USA). The initiative brought together represenlatives of 
government agencies and international NGOs that worked in rural Mozambique to 
examine how associationsof volunteers could befomiedindeslocado communities 
to promote local solutions to the problems faced by displaced children, including 
unaccompanied children. The initiative also hoped to utilise members of these 
community associations as core components of a national tracing programme that 
would be linked together through DNAS-led tracing teams and its provincial and 
central offices.
Reuniting Unaccompanied Children 15 
Programme activities took place over a six-month period and were organised into 
two phases. Phase one involved a seven-week workshop for national-level staff of 
relevant government agencies and NGOs held at the Lhanguene Centre in Maputo. 
During this time, participants designed training modules for district-level 
associations of primary school teachers, police, military, members of the 
Mozambican women's and youth organisations, and other volunteers who might 
become membersofthecommunity associations. As partof this training.procedures 
developed to identify, document, search for and reunite children and families were 
organised into a six-part process: 
1. Identification: 
The tracing and reunification effort would begin with an active search to identify 
all children in need of assistance in locating lost family members. Procedures were 
devised to identify and document unaccompanied children in orphanages and other 
child care institutions, hospitals and feeding centres, living on the streets in urban 
areas, and with substitute families in deslocado centres or refugee camps in 
neighbouring countries. 
2. Documentation: 
Procedures and forms were produced to record biographical information on 
children who were identified as unaccompanied and in need of assistance in 
locating lost family members. It was decided that Polaroid cameras should be made 
available to tracing teams and that a photograph of each child should be taken and 
attached to the biographical form which was men sent to DNAS central office and 
transferred into posters and circulated nationwide. 
3. Tracing: 
Procedures, in turn, were established to initiate active searches for the documented 
children's lost family members in other locations, including the children's original 
communities, deslocado centres, towns and other urban locations where people 
from the children's original communities might have fled, and refugee camps in 
neighbouring countries. Techniques were outlined for disseminating information 
on lost children through word-of-mouth and written communications, mass 
community meetings, poster canvassing, and radio, newspaper and television 
announcements. Participating NGOs were to provide the air transportation and 
logistical support required to undertake the search for lost family members in areas 
not accessible by truck or other means.
16 NeilBoothby 
4. Verification: 
After a child's relative was identified, procedures were developed to verify 
whether or not both parties - the child and the relative - wanted to be reunited with 
one another. 
5. Reunification: 
Guidelines were developed for the safe return of the child to the family. At the time 
of reunification, the family was to be provided with a "kit" of basic food staples, 
farming tools and seeds to help with the initial transition period. In addition to 
transportation support, participating NGOs were also to provide a wider range of 
assistance to the community and the schools whenever possible. Support for 
agricultural projects, water projects, health clinics, pre-schools, vocational training 
and recreation programmes were deemed to be most appropriate. 
6. Follow-up: 
Along with procedures for formal "home visits" by DNAS social workers, basic 
ideas were outlined on how the wider community might help to support the child 
and the family after reunifications took place. Including neighbours and other kin 
in reunification ceremonies, helping the family secure god-parents for the child (if 
he or she did not already have one), and alerting school teachers or health workers 
about any special needs or problems the child might have were among the ideas 
adopted by Lhanguene participants. 
As part of the Maputo-based workshops, national participants field-tested their 
revised tracing procedures at several youth facilities and deslocado communities 
in and around the capital. In two week's time, over 200 unaccompanied children 
were documented and their biographical data and photographs were printed on a 
series of posters that were subsequently used as part of an inaugural family tracing 
campaign. The first effort to search for missing family members under these 
revised procedures took place in Chibuto district, Gaza Province, where twentyeight 
of the children documented in Maputo had come from. A small group of 
original Llanguene participants worked with FRELIMO Party members, citizen 
volunteers and provincial-level DNAS agents to organise a series of community 
meetings and poster canvassing among deslocado settlements in and around this 
district capital. Within days, relatives of 25 of the 28 children from Chibuto had 
been found. The tracing teams also worked with community volunteers to identify 
an additional 200 children in Gaza who needed assistance in locating lost parents 
or other relatives. 
The second phase of the Lhanguene Initiative established similar tracing teams 
and community associations in several parts of rural Mozambique. Tracing 
workshops were conducted in Gaza, Inhambane, Sofala and Zambezia for up to 35
Reuniting Unaccompanied Children 17 
district representatives per province. After a week's instruction, participants 
divided themselves into small groups and flew into rural districts to work with 
community leaders and volunteers to initiate tracing campaigns in some of the 
worst war-affected areas of the country. More than 1,500 unaccompanied children 
were documented through these efforts, one-half of whom were eventually 
reunited with their relatives through the subsequent mobilisation of communities, 
volunteer work and massive poster canvassing. 
The Lhanguene Initiative indicated that if DNAS and NGOs could work 
together with local leaders and community volunteers in war-affected districts, 
significant numbers of unaccompanied children could be documented and family 
members located for them within a two to three month period of time. The nearunanimous 
desire on the part of parents and other relatives to have the children 
returned to them as soon as possible also suggested that family reunification was 
a viable placement option for unaccompanied children in many of parts of southern 
and central Mozambique. 
Based on these initial results, three members of the International Save the 
Children Alliance working in Mozambique agreed to cooperate to expand the 
tracing effort to all provinces. Save the Children Fund (UK) would continue to 
support DNAS central, as it had in the past, and help the Maputo city office to 
establish and maintain a computerised data base system for storing and crosschecking 
tracing documentation generated in the districts. In addition, Save the 
ChildrenFund (UK) would support expansionsof the tracing effort into Inhambane 
and Zambezia provinces. Redd Barna (Norwegian Save the Children), in turn, 
which operated material assistance programmes in Manica, would work with 
provincial DNAS staff to support tracing activities in that province. Finally, Save 
the Children Federation (USA) would expand its work in Maputo, Gaza and Sofala 
provinces and, by 1990, would begin to extend support to Tele, Nampula, Cabo 
Delgado, and Niassa provinces as well. 
Informal Networks 
While the tracing efforts that evolved out of the Lhanguene Initiative began to 
strengthen the nation's response to unaccompanied children, the programme was 
also fraught with problems. To be sure, registration, documentation, searching and 
record-keeping is tedious, exactingandtimeintensive work with many opportunities 
for errors, especially in the unstable settings in which much of the active tracing 
activities occurred. Over the next two years, as the programme expanded into other 
provinces and additional groups of community volunteers were established 
throughout the country, DNAS proved increasingly unable to keep-up with the
18 NeilBoothby 
monumental task of documentation, data collection, logistical support, and longterm 
planning. But rather than simplify its procedures, delegate responsibilities, or 
decentralise its approach in other ways, DNAS insisted that all documentation be 
transferred to, and all programme activities be cleared through its central office in 
Maputo. One of the most negative aspects of this bottleneck was that the amount 
of time required to complete the tracing process from identification to documentation 
to reunification often increased from what was once three months or less to what 
is now six months or more. 
At the same time DNAS was overwhelmed with programmatic responsibilities 
at the central level, tracing teams in some districts were identifying ways to make 
the tracing effortmore effective at the locallevel. The most important development 
at the local level involved the identification of the informal kinship systems for 
disseminating and exchanging information on separated family members that 
already existed in much of rural Mozambique. The informal tracing system 
involved networks of local people who had a keen interest in the problems of 
kinsmen, including children, who had been separated by war. It included people 
who had managed to escape from RENAMO, and who had assumed responsibility 
for seeking out relatives of other kidnapped or impressed people they had met while 
in RENAMO's controlled zones. It also included chiefs and other traditional 
political leaders because they are often the first authorities consulted in matters of 
separated family members, as traditionally their sanction was required to mobilise 
rural people. Traditional healers, church leaders and traders were part of these 
networks as well, because these individuals usually had their own links to 
counterparts within Mozambique and in refugee camps and other communities in 
neighbouring countries. 
Members of some district-level tracing teams also began to learn more about 
how rural people and deslocados consulted healers who would divine whether a 
missing child was alive or well. If divination indicated there had been a death, 
healers would advise holding a funeral ceremony. Sometimes they would make a 
mistake, and a "buried" child would show up, at which time the healer prescribed 
oneof several "treatments" necessary tocleansethechild'sspiritfrom past traumas 
or wrong-doings. If the child's parents were dead or absent, the healer often would 
offer advice about with whom the child should reside. Here, too, healers were 
already active in facilitating family placements through community structures for 
children without parents of their own. 
While the Lhanguene workshops had paid insufficient attention to these preexisting 
informal tracing networks, members of tracing teams quickly began to 
merge the formal and informal systems - a collaborative effort that usually led to 
dramatic increases in both the number of unaccompanied children documented 
and the number of documented children reunited with family members. After a
Reuniting Unaccompanied Children 19 
RENAMO attack, or when FRELIMO liberated rural towns or villages from 
RENAMO control, members of both networks joined together to identify 
unaccompanied children and search for missing family members. Formal tracing 
teams continued to send registration forms to DNAS's central office in Maputo, 
where data was entered into its centralised computer system, cross-checked against 
adults with claims for missing children, and transformed into tracing posters which 
then were sent to deslocado centres throughout the country. When tracing materials 
arrived in the districts, community volunteers organised mass meetings and 
distributed posters in deslocado centres. FRELIMO armed forces often cooperated 
by carrying posters to areas where formal tracing teams could not venture because 
of the lack of security. Traditional leaders, healers and traders, on the other hand, 
who did not depend on formal tracing documents or posters, were often able to 
identify lostfamily members more quickly. Word-of-mouth communications were 
passed through kinship networks and trading routes and, in this way, traditional 
political leaders and healers and local traders were able to extend the tracing effort 
even further into RENAMO-controlled zones and across political boundaries to 
refugee settlements in neighbouring countries. 
In Morromeau, for example, a district capital in Sofala Province, members of 
both formal and informal tracing systems began working together after an August 
1989 RENAMO attack had scattered most of the area's population. Within days, 
over 800 children and adults who had been separated from one another were 
documented. While 350 children were eventually reunited with relatives through 
formal tracing procedures, an additional 320 reunifications were facilitated more 
quickly through grassroots searches and citizen initiatives. Despite theeffectiveness 
of this combined effort, DNAS did not formally acknowledge the role of the area's 
traditional leaders and traditional healers, or include the "spontaneous" family 
reunions facilitated by them as part of the national statistics on family reunifications. 
Decentralisation and Expansion 
DNAS' reluctance to acknowledge the roles of traditional leaders was in part the 
result of the government's earlier modernisation strategy. After independence, 
FRELIMO sought to radically transform what it referred to as "an economically 
backward agrarian society" through its unique interpretation of "scientific 
socialism", which required the virtual elimination of many of the underpinnings of 
Mozambican society such as polygamy, puberty rites and traditional healing. The 
role of the chiefs was officially abolished, forcing many of them underground and 
into alliances with RENAMO. In the same way, traditional healers were excluded 
from the government's health system and branded as purveyors of "obscurantism 
and superstition".
20 Neil Boothby 
With the alienation of traditional healers and traditional leaders, FRELIMO had 
put itself at a distinct disadvantage in most of rural Mozambique. Because of 
FRELIMO's tradition of ideological hostility, many of these natural leaders had 
aligned themselves with RENAMO, at least until the mid - 1980s when FRELIMO 
began to adoptamore conciliatory posture towards them. ThechangeinFRELIMO's 
attitude, in part a pragmatic decision based on the need to include healers and 
spiritualists as part of its military campaign, coupled with these leaders' growing 
alienation with RENAMO's tactics, led many of them into new alliances with 
governmental authority. These alliances, in turn, have been an important factor in 
turning the fortunes of war against RENAMO, especially in northern Mozambique 
(Lauriciano, 1990; Wilson, 1991). 
FRELIMO's courting of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and 
other western donors also triggered a range of socio-economic changes that 
affected the nation's humanitarian assistance effort as well. The donor message 
was clear: decentralise government programmes in favour of private and nongovernmental 
initiatives, or suffer significant decreases in financial support. In 
1991, DNAS separated from the Ministry of Health and was re-established as the 
Secretariat of Social Action (SEAS). An initial review of programmatic activities 
by the new SEAS director confirmed that DNAS had largely proven itself unable 
at least at this time to maintain programmes that reached children and families at 
the district level. Later that year, SEAS formally announced its decision to redefine 
its role from an implementing agency to a policy-making body. The tracing effort 
would no longer be so closely bound to the Maputo office or its staff. 
The move towards decentralisation has enabled staff of national and international 
organisations working with unaccompanied children to better understand the 
perspective at the local level: government workers come and go - and may be 
trusted or mistrusted - but traditional and local leaders usually remain. This 
perspective has encouraged both national and international organisations to 
discover and to build upon pre-existing community networks in a variety of ways, 
including theprovision of directflnancial support, training, application of technology 
when possible, and the linkage of these local groups to wider networks of 
volunteers and organisations. As a result, more than 8,000 volunteers, supported 
by over 700 national and international organisations are now involved in day-today 
tracing activities throughout Mozambique. Formal associations of national 
and international organisations linked to informal associations of community 
volunteers have managed to reunite more than 14,000 unaccompanied children 
with their families over the past four years. Many community volunteers, including 
traditional political leaders and traditional healers, are now the primary implements 
of their community's foster care, mental health, traditional pre-school, vocational 
training, and mentoring programmes for displaced children as well.
Reuniting Unaccompanied Children 21 
In some districts, tracing efforts continue to profit from close collaboration with 
Social Action (SEAS), especially where social workers already had close ties to 
grassroots networks. In other districts, Social Action staff have been too weak, too 
overburdened with other responsibilities, and too often transferred from one 
province to another to be effective in carrying-out tracing activities. Some Social 
Action staff have refused altogether to work with traditional political leaders or 
healers. 
It can be argued that the government's inability to deliver services may have 
provided the opportunity for NGOs to develop more sustainable and cost-effective 
strategies for displaced and unaccompanied children. Indeed, many of these nongovernmental 
organisations have closer relationships and more informal authority 
in war-affected districts than Social Action. Open to question, however, is how far 
any NGO, especially an international one, should go beyond its own mandate and 
replace government's function. 
Lessons Learned 
Mozambique is not alone in the struggle to provide care and protection to children 
separated from their families because of war, natural disasters and mass population 
displacements. An historical review of this issue indicated that they have existed 
in virtually every past war or refugee crisis in this century (Ressler, Boothby & 
Steinbock, 1988). Unaccompanied children also are to be found in almost all of 
present-day emergencies including Kampuchea, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kuwait, 
Guatemala, ElSalvador,Nicaragua,Suriname,Yugoslavia,Zaire,Ethiopia, Somalia, 
Liberia, and others. On the basis of past and presence experience, it is certain that 
the future will produce its share of unaccompanied children as well. 
There is a basic lesson to be learned from Mozambique that could assist with 
similar programmes in Africa and other countries: reuniting children and families 
is likely to be a high priority for war-affected communities, but not for government 
agencies or NGOs, especially in times of war, drought and starvation. As a result, 
no government agency or NGO can be very effective in documentation, tracing and 
reunification work without the active involvement of refugees or dislocated people 
themselves. Moreover, since lost family members are motivated to find one 
another, informal networks of people will already be communicating with each 
other about these matters apart from formal programmes initiated by national or 
international agencies. Tracing and reunification activities - whether government, 
non-profit or private-should identify active local leaders, build upon their informal 
systems, and then do what it can with its technological advantages (posters,
22 NeilBoothby 
telephones, computerdatabases, and rapid transportation) toassistthese networks, 
while the networks, in turn, assist the formal programmes. Moreover, when there 
are cooperating networks of community-based volunteers, they can also be 
effective in the selection of appropriate foster families, programmes of psychosocial 
intervention, skill training, famine relief and delivering emergency supplies. 
References 
Boothby Neil, Upton Peter&Sultan Abubacar (1991) Children of Mozambique: 
The Cost of Survival, US Committee for Refugees, Washington DC. 
ECA and UN Inter-Agency Force, Africa Recovery Program (1989) South 
African Destabilisation, United Nations, New York. 
FRELIMO (1989) "For the Normalization of Life", Report of the Central 
Committee, English Translation, MIO, London. 
Lauriciano, G (1990) "Spiritual Phenomena: Another Revolution in the 
Countryside", Domingo, August 9, Maputo. 
Mangueria, Joanna (1990) Personal communication, Maputo. 
Ressler Everett, Boothby Neil & Steinbock Daniel (1988) Unaccompanied 
Children in Emergencies: Care and Protection in Wars, Natural Disasters 
and Mass Population Movements, Oxford University Press, New York. 
UNICEF (1989) Children on the Front Line: Update, UNICEF Annual Report, 
Mozambique, Swaziland, New Yo±. 
Wilson, Ken (1991) "Cults of Violence and Counter-Violence in Mozambique", 
The Journal of Southern African Studies and Oxford Committee for 
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Oxford.