The villages of Malawi need schools, health clinics and sources of clean water - not celebrity adoptions, writes Eleanor Hutchinson, who has researched orphan care there
Malawi is a very poor country. Access to food is a problem for well over half of the population; healthcare services are scarce and of poor quality. Although there are a number of new schools being built in Malawi, education for the most part remains patchy and over-subscribed, with class sizes in some primary schools at around 250.
Almost one in five adults is HIV-positive and one of the many offshoots of the epidemic is a rapid growth in orphaned children.
As his mother had died and his father felt he could not cope, the boy that Madonna took out of Malawi had been placed in an orphanage.
His father was then approached and asked whether the boy might be taken out of the country and he had agreed. Where then is the problem with David Banda being adopted by the pop star and taken out of Malawi to live a life of luxury?
The problems begin with the notion that, as this child had been put into an orphanage, he would never live with his parent or another relative again. Children, whether orphaned or not, do not always live with their parents and are frequently fostered by relatives in Malawi. The idea of adoption as a permanent state, where a child goes to a non-relative, does not seem to exist in Malawi.
One Malawian orphanage, that legally adopts children from their extended family, has had to develop a complex, drawn-out system in which they meet the families of orphaned children several times before the child is taken into their care.
During these meetings, the reality that placing the child in an orphanage results in the family giving up all of their rights and responsibilities in relation to the child is emphasised and reiterated. Though time-consuming, this system had to be developed as on numerous occasions children's relatives had, some two or three years after the child's adoption, arrived at the orphanage and demanded that their child be returned to them.
This brings us on to the second point - the difficulty of trying to understand what it means to be an orphan in Malawi. The idea of being an orphan is vastly different to the meaning in Britain or elsewhere in the developed world.
Given the region in which the "adoption" took place and the surname Banda, we can assume that this child's father is a Chewa. Like many central and southern African societies, Chewa children refer to both their mothers and their maternal aunts as "mother".
If you are a Chewa and your mother has an older sister, then she will be known as your "big mother". Equally, your mother's younger sisters will be your "little mothers". This is more than semantics. Many orphaned children whom I interviewed as part of my research into orphans in Malawi went to live with their aunts when their mothers died. According to them, the transition is easier because they were going to women who were already mothers to them.
Uncles also take on very important roles. In Chewa tradition your mother's eldest brother is an extremely important relative. While the nuclear family is in evidence in Malawi, very often the mother's brother takes responsibility for her child in times of crisis. While a biological father also has responsibility for his children, the child's maternal uncle retains the right to reprimand the father if he does not care properly for a child. If you are an orphaned child in Malawi from the central or southern region, it is your maternal uncle, and not your father, who will decide upon what is appropriate for you. If your mother dies, this hierarchy becomes particularly significant.
The question therefore arises: should David Banda be most usefully thought of as an orphan in need of a new family (in this case provided by a pop star), or as a child whose mother has died but who very probably has strong family structures in his village?
These children, like the vast majority of children in Malawi, live in extreme poverty.
While it is easy to conclude that their families have abandoned them, this is not the case. Remarkable as it seems, extraordinarily poor families take children into their households and care for them as well as they can. In fact, empirical research suggests that orphaned children do as well, if not better, than their non-orphaned counterparts.
Thus in deciding whether Madonna was right to take the child we need to remember the following: Malawians often leave their children in orphanages for a limited amount of time; and Mr Banda is not the only relative who has rights over, or who will feel some responsibility for, this child. Moreover, does Mr Banda know that he is permanently giving up his legal rights over his son? Do the boy's maternal relatives know that they too are giving up their legal rights over him?
And perhaps most importantly, does Madonna realise that she is taking a child away from a man who placed his child in an orphanage simply because he was poor, and who is quoted as saying that he will give up his son because he knows that he would be healthier and better educated in the US than if he were to stay in Malawi?
Perhaps if Madonna was to act in David Banda's best interests, then she would leave him where he is and instead of investing in an orphanage as she plans to do, she would use her money to provide his village and area with a school, a clinic, running water and untold other projects that could enable him and other children, orphaned or not, to have less hunger and better opportunities for the future.
Eleanor Hutchinson is a research assistant with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development