Bulgarian Ministers to Give BGN 3,600 to Orphans
The Bulgarian ministers have decided to take BGN 200 of their salaries and spend them on presents for children from three orphanages in Sofia.
Bulgaria’s PM Boyko Borisov and the ministers will collect a total of BGN 3,600 and will give them to children in the orphanages in the Sofia districts Dragalevtsi and Nadezhda, and to the orphanage for babies “St. Ivan Rilski.”
At the meeting on Tuesday, the government decided to close the home for medical and social care in the Bulgarian town of Teteven, which has hosted a total of 38 children below 3 years of age, 28 of which in good health, since the beginning of 2010.
Ten children have been reintegrated into their biological families, 24 have been adopted and one has been placed in a foster family. The last three children will be taken out of the orphanage by the end of the year.
One of Bulgaria's national strategies is to keep abandoned children out of orphanages by 2020.
Abandoned Bulgarian children should not live any longer in specialized institutions by 2020, according to Bulgaria's national strategy for keeping children out of orphanages.
Some EUR 180 M is the amount of money planned for spending on keeping Bulgarian children out of the orphanages. A total of 130 institutions will be closed and five projects have already started for achieving that.
One of these projects, funded by EU's "
Human Resources Development"
operative program, is for the closure of 24 Bulgarian institutions for disabled children.
Another project is for closing 74 orphanages.
Additionally, according to the National Strategy, every community in Bulgaria which has the status of a regional centre must have at least 10 foster families.
At present, there are 475 foster families in Bulgaria, which have accommodated more than 417 children. Last year, 800 children were adopted.
The number of institutions for children below three years of age is 32. They have accommodated 2 334 children and only 0.7% of them are orphans. Most of the children are abandoned due to poverty.
A shocking announcement was made recently that malnutrition, cold, and deplorable living conditions have claimed the lives of 236 Bulgarian orphans in the last 10 years.
The case with the Bulgarian orphanage in the Mogilino village became particularly publicly known two years ago, when BBC broadcast a documentary dedicated to the abandoned children in Bulgaria and the strikingly poor conditions in Bulgarian orphanages.