Hi everyone,

As part of the global SAP Corporate Social Responsibility team, I am responsible for managing our worldwide Technology Donation program that provides free reporting and data visualizaton tools to over 900 non-profts each year in 15 countries. We have been partnering with TechSoup for quite a while now and am excited about the many possibilites to engage.

There are many sources for research into the plight of social orphans, ie those in institutional care due to economic circumstance. Today I found a summary of some of the more heavy reading: 

ORPHAN STATISTICS

The statistics will amaze you:
1. There are over 100,000 orphans in Ukraine.
2. The older an orphan gets, the chances for his/her adoption drastically decrease.
3. Each year many orphans between 15 to 18-years-old leave the orphanages.
4. Most of these orphans have no one to turn to for help.
5. About 10% of them will commit suicide after leaving the orphanage before their eighteenth birthday.
6. 60% of the girls will end up in prostitution
7. 70% of the boys will enter a life of crime
8. Only 27% of these youth will find work
These youth live in a country that labels them as “useless” and gives no assistance to turn their lives around. It is a society that has created its own problem by placing thousands of children in orphanages, and then when they come of age, they give them no assistance to lead a successful life. It is almost as if the system places them in trade schools to become “slaves of the State” to fill the low-income jobs of unskilled labor and remain the under-trodden, 2nd-class citizens that the majority of the population of Ukraine believe that they are.