Georgette set up mother & baby home at Ecatarina/Bucharest

Moreover, without a legal framework there were numerous impediments to the creation of innovative projects for preventing child abandonment within the ‘old’ childcare institutions, as illustrated by Georgette Mulheir. She came to Romania through a program of ‘technical assistance’ run by the Romanian Orphanage Trust in 1993, and helped to set up a pilot mother-and-baby unit in a childcare institution for babies in Bucharest. She recalled in an interview that the project, although necessary for preventing the institutionalization of babies, was created ‘against all odds’. The difficulties came from several directions and particularly from not having a legal framework for childcare services:

Legally it was very limited what we were trying to do. There were no laws to run prevention services; (…) there was no legislative framework for this apart from something very old in a law, which allowed a mother to stay with her child in an institution. So we were able to set up this separate section inside the institution without there being a change in law (interview with Georgette Mulheir).

Thus transnational organizations

s