A Brief Bio About Georgette Mulheir
Georgette Mulheir has spent a greater part of her life working to transform care and protection systems for children worldwide. She has vast experience in the area of transforming care for children having worked in over 33 countries in the past 3 decades. Georgette Mulheir has played her crucial role in providing advice for governments, donors, and the international community about transforming care for children. Georgette Mulheir has championed and brought forth the plight of children in orphanages and compelled governments and international top decision makers to end the harm caused by the institutionalization of children. She has been at the forefront of a global movement that has brought to light the severe damage caused to children in orphanages.
How Georgette Mulheir helped bring to light the plight of children in orphanages in Haiti
Georgette Mulheir began to work in Haiti in 2015 and that’s when she came to realize that most of the children in Haitian orphanages were there because of some form of trafficking. Trafficking of children in a Haitian orphanage was encouraged by the fact that most orphanages are privately run and unregistered. Also, most of the Haitian orphanages are supported by churches based in the US that send people to volunteer. Poor parents were coerced to give up their children and promised that their children would be provided with care and education that they could not afford. When the children got to the orphanages, they lived under harsh conditions which enabled the orphanages to get more funding and the children rarely received any education.
This pattern of trafficking is rampant in Africa and Asia in countries such as Uganda, Kenya, and Cambodia. Georgette Mulheir led a program that proved orphanage trafficking was a real and serious threat to the welfare of children. Her team researched and found out that the Haitian orphanages received at least USD 100 million for 30, 000 children that had been trafficked so that the orphanages would receive these donations. Georgette presented findings from this program to the Australian Inquiry Commission on Modern Slavery and Australia was the first country in the world to legislate against modern slavery.