‘I felt like I had been loaned out’: the children sent to relatives in search of a better life

Image Description: A folded school uniform rests on a concrete floor beside a straw broom, a shallow metal basin, and a small cooking pot. The room is dim and empty with no people present.

Fatimah’s life would never be the same after her mother decided to move on with a new husband. She was born out of wedlock to two teenage parents and had to live through instability for most of her early life. When her mother remarried, Fatimah, barely five, was quietly dropped off with her father, who was both unprepared and unwilling to care for a child. By the time she was seven, decisions about her life were made in hushed conversations she wasn’t invited into. That year, Fatimah was sent from her home in Ibadan to live with her elderly grandmother in Ilorin, Nigeria. 

“She told me I’d be helping Mama,” Fatimah recalls. “And that I’d go to school.” 

Unfortunately, the arrangement turned out to be less about education and more about labour. Fatimah’s daily routine began before dawn: sweeping the compound, heating bathwater, and preparing a tray of sweets and biscuits to hawk at busy junctions before school, which she would do again after classes until sundown. 

Back home, she helped her grandmother, a frail woman struggling with chronic illness, helping her to eat, bathe, and use the toilet. She managed to do her homework sitting beside the heat of coal and firewood stoves, her schoolbooks smudged with ash and palm oil. 

“It was hard,” Fatimah says quietly. “But I’m used to it now.” 

Ann, a 32-year-old woman from Kampala, Uganda, was seven when she learned that the woman she called “mum” was not her mother, but her father’s younger sister.

“My father had taken me to her home in Kampala before I turned one,” she says.

At 12, her life shifted again. Her aunt, who had raised her, got married and wanted to start her own family, and her new husband was not interested in raising a child who was not theirs. Ann was sent to live with another aunt. This time, the arrangement was different: her father would continue to provide school fees and basic needs, but she would live elsewhere. 

“My father kept promising that I would return home to my mother soon,” she recalls. “But by 14, I was made to feel guilty for even wanting that. I was told she had nothing to offer, that I was better off at my paternal aunt’s.”

According to Ann, education, shelter, and clothing came at a cost.

“All I had to do was chores and errands,” she says. “But I hated it. Every mistake reminded me I was a charity case. If I wasn’t on my best behavior, I was told I would be sent back to my mother.”

For years, that reality shaped how she saw her family.

“I resented my parents,” she admits. “For being poor, for raising my siblings while I was sent away in the name of a better future. I felt like I had been loaned out, and my parents failed to collect me back.” 

To understand how a practice rooted in community protection began to fray, I spoke with Nurah Jimoh, a lawyer and researcher focused on child development in Nigeria. She uses a specific, sobering term to describe what Fatimah is living through: “child lending.”

“In legal or academic circles, we might use the sterile label of ‘informal kinship care,’” Jimoh explains. “But on the ground, what we are seeing is child lending. It is a social loan. A child is ‘lent’ to a relative or a neighbour to solve a temporary problem, a sick grandmother, a busy shop, a lonely aunt, new parents. The parents don’t see it as giving the child away; they see it as a redistribution of a family’s most available resource: the child’s presence and labour.”

Historically, practices like these weren’t seen as abandonment or exploitation. In many Nigerian households, especially when families were large and resources stretched thin, ‘child lending’ was a community strategy for survival. A child might be sent to assist an ageing grandparent, support a new mother recovering from childbirth, or ease financial pressure on their immediate family. The expectation wasn’t necessarily cruelty, but contribution. Within kin networks, it was often viewed as a redistribution of responsibility, an unspoken agreement where the child’s labour was exchanged for shelter, basic care, or the promise of education. 

Over time, however, as these informal arrangements continued without regulation or oversight, many of the children caught in them found themselves shouldering far more than domestic tasks. They bore emotional, physical, and educational burdens far beyond their years, often with no space to speak about their experiences and no guarantee that anyone was truly looking out for their well-being. 

“While living with relatives, I was never the first choice. I wore hand-me-downs from my cousins, always oversized, and I was expected to be grateful for them, because in my father’s house, we couldn’t afford such things,” Ann says. “My role was to be content and not complain. Even when I was made to sleep in what used to be a chicken house turned into a bedroom, I had to be grateful. At least, I was told, I had a room at all.” 

“It was never meant to be abuse,” Jimoh explains. “It was survival. It was family. It was kinship care, long before that term even existed. And in many cases, it worked.”

She recounts the story of Abosede, a successful Director of Nursing in a federal hospital in Lagos, who also happens to be a neighbour to Fatimah. Of all her siblings, it was Abosede who was sent away and ‘lent’ to a childless aunt struggling with health issues in Oyo State. 

“She was just about to enter secondary school,” Jimoh says. “And because she was the most emotionally mature, her parents believed she could adapt.” 

Her upbringing shifted radically. Raised in a predominantly northern home, she now had to adapt to the cultural norms of a Yoruba household, one where discipline, self-reliance, and silence were highly valued. 

Abosede says the experience shaped her. It gave her a foundation of grit that carried her through nursing school, into her first supervisory role, and eventually into a leadership career. But the cost was real. 

“She missed her sisters terribly. She often felt like a visitor, not a daughter,” Jimoh says. “And she said to me once, ‘I don’t think I ever felt truly at home again after that.’” 

It’s this duality that Nurah emphasises: children living with relatives can, under the right conditions, thrive. But when done without support, consent, or oversight, it becomes just another form of institutional neglect wearing a traditional mask. 

A report by the American Bar Association highlights that early and prolonged separation from parents is strongly associated with delayed emotional development, poor social integration, and an increased risk of abuse, even when the arrangement is temporary or well-intentioned. 

And in Nigeria, where many of these arrangements happen informally, without legal protection, oversight, or psychological support, the risks are rarely measured until the damage is already done. 

These risks are not evenly distributed. Girls often bear the heaviest burdens of child lending, as they are widely perceived to be better suited to caregiving and domestic work. 

“The disruption is enormous,” Jimoh explains. “You remove a child from their primary caregivers, shift their social environment, and then saddle them with responsibility before they’ve even built their own foundation. But when it’s a girl, people don’t just expect her to adjust—they expect her to perform.” 

A study published in EAS Publisher found that girls in low-income households in Nigeria are twice as likely as boys to be withdrawn from school for caregiving or economic purposes. Even when they remain enrolled, their attendance is often inconsistent, and their academic performance suffers due to exhaustion and limited time. 

Today, Fatimah remains in the house in Ilorin, waking before sunrise to the familiar sounds of a compound coming to life. She still cares for her grandmother, and the scent of coal smoke lingers in her hair, but her journey has begun to settle into something more stable. 

Meanwhile, Ann looks back on her childhood with mixed emotions. She is grateful that living with relatives opened doors she might never have accessed had she remained with her parents. But she also wishes she had been raised with more love.

Today, her life reflects both those memories and her attempt to reshape them. She lives with her son, her partner, her youngest sister, and the daughter of a friend who is “struggling financially.” She calls the little girl “my daughter.”

“I was raised by relatives, and I want to help others with the little that I have,” she says. “I just hope my sister and my daughter are happier than I was in my aunts’ homes.”

PK Cross contributed additional reporting to this story. 

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Edited/Reviewed by PK Cross, Caleb Okereke, Awom Kenneth, and Uzoma Ihejirika.

 

Illustrated by: Rex Opara