Last year we started the The Fatherheart Fund, to date the response has been less than inspiring. I’ve spent sometime looking over world and South African Statistics and it’s scary!

At first glance the numbers hit home with a rather sudden thud:

Number of orphans worldwide: 153 million

Number of Christians worldwide: 2.2 billion

Obviously we need to consider that some of these are not adoptable given the definition of “Orphan” being divided into 3 parts, namely Maternal, Paternal and Double, but with the numbers above, we arrive at a paltry 7% of Christians needing to adopt.

Yup, 7% of the Christians above would wipe out the number of orphans. If we look only at double orphans (those most likely to be declared adoptable) we come to 17.8 million children which would require less than 1% of our Christian population to provide forever families.

To be fair, due to social, economic, age and other factors, 2.2 billion Christians is probably not the most accurate or fair statistic to use. But even if we were to agree that only 10% of the number of Christian’s were able to adopt (220 million), that’s approximately the number of Christians in the USA based on their current population, we would still be looking at around 8%.

The picture in South Africa is not much better. We have approximately 556 000 Double Orphans. We stand as a country with approximately 80% of people being aligned with the Christian faith, that’s around 41 million Christians.

Taking potential parents as being between 25 and 39 years, we’re looking at just over 8 million potential Christians living within South African borders. That’s people who have no problem accepting son/daughtership through adoption, no problem accepting being adopted in God’s family and being joint heirs with Christ, not to mention that they are specifically ordered, not suggested, to look after the orphans, James 1:27, Deuteronomy 10:18 and Psalm 10:14 come to mind as endorsements of this.

But what about the unemployed, surely they can’t adopt? Fine! With 25% of our workforce being unemployed let’s throw that number in the pot as well. In fact, lets throw the whole number at our Christian population, an overkill, but hey, it should drive the point home. We’re left with a little over 6 million Christian, employed adults, between the ages of 25 and 39. That sounds fair!

This means, 9 percent of the employed Christians aged between 25 – 39 in South Africa need to adopt to eliminate the number of adoptable children, WHAT!!!!

Given that some kids age out, are older and so perhaps less favoured, and some other factors, I’d say 9% is the worst case scenario or perhaps the best, depending how you look at it.

WHERE TO NEXT?