As National Adoption Month is approaching in the US (November of each year) and as the Department of Health traditionally focuses on adoption of children from foster care, I thought it was interesting to look at Intercountry Adoptions with a development perspective.
The Viz displays historical trends for 164 birth countries for adopted babies/children in 17 adoptive countries around the globe in an interactive way, exploring the links between Adoption and Birth Countries Development.
Analysis:
On the podium of Adoptive Families Countries over the 1991-2011 period, the USA are leading with 252,881 adoptions, far ahead of Spain with 29,776, Italy (27,593) and France (19,571). Among the top Sending Countries in Asia we find China (104,207) and South Korea (27,455), while Russia (75,055) and Ukraine (16,711) are sending most babies and children from Europe. In Americas, the leader is Guatemala with 32,743 kids sent for adoption worldwide. Ethiopia (16,523) is the largest provider in Africa of babies/children to be adopted.
When looking at development metrics for countries sending kids for adoption, as anticipated, Low Income countries represent 50% of the total, whereas Lower Middle Income countries amounts to 35 and Upper Middle Income countries are also 35. Finally, it is not surprising that High Income countries are only 13 to have sent babies/children abroad. Some more unexpected findings come from the Human Development Indexes (HDI). There is an even distribution of the countries offering kids for adoption among the different HDI categories: Low HDI (47 countries), Medium HDI (44 countries), High HDI (40 countries) and Very HDI (33 countries). A remarkable case in point is that the US sent 933 babies over the 2000-2009 period, mostly to Canada (317) and the UK (62). This trend is illustrated by the bottom right-hand corner graph in the dashboard below.
The Viz:
In order to get a satisfying level of user-friendly interactivity. I divided the parameters in two main custom parameter categories. The first one is Birth place (you can refine by baby/child Birth Continent, Country or Human Development Index). The second one is Adoption place (you can sort by the Adoptive Parents Continent or Country) If you would like to update the map based on an specific flow, just click the arrow and the charts will update. For more details on each chart, you can hover over selected areas to reveal more information. Those multiple filters really facilitate the data drilling process.
Sources:
Adoption data:
United States Department of Health and Human Services, www.hhs.gov and www.childwelfare.gov
AICAN, Australian InterCountry Adoption Network
Development data:
Human Development Index: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), http://hdr.undp.org
Income Index: Human Development Report Office, GNI per capita (2005 PPP International $, using natural logarithm), UNDP, http://hdrstats.undp.org
Special Thanks to Dr Peter Selman from Newcastle University (UK) for his helpful comments.
First posted September, 11th 2012, Last Updated September 4th 2014.
About me: French professional and happy globe-trotter, interested in data driven investigations in the field of politics and social trends. Currently expat in New York City, NY and working for a major American litigation and financial investigations consulting firm, dealing with large data sets and vizualisation tools for international clients and corporations.
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