Spanish columnist Ángela Vallvey used an opinion piece published on 24 August 2026 to argue that Morocco has failed to address a large, uncounted number of abandoned and street children, saying many of them end up being sent to Spain, where she said they are raised, fed and educated at the expense of Spanish taxpayers.
Vallvey wrote that it seemed evident that Morocco, which she referred to as Spain's African neighbour, has a problem with the way it treats its children. She said the children do not starve outright, but that the country has an unknown number of abandoned children and street children whom, she claimed, it eventually sends to Spain or whose departure it facilitates.
Morocco's 2012 adoption ban
Vallvey pointed to a decision taken in 2012 by Morocco's Ministry of Justice to ban international adoptions of Moroccan children by foreigners. She said the government justified the ban by arguing that such adoptions could not guarantee the children would keep their Muslim religion or their identity of origin.
She argued that, as a result, many of these children are left without state support, living in poverty and facing a lifetime of marginalisation, while remaining, in her words, thoroughly Muslim.
The Kafala system
Much of the column centres on Kafala, the Islamic legal framework for fostering orphaned or abandoned children. Kafala is the only recognised form of child fostering under Islamic law and does not create a legal parent-child relationship or inheritance rights, unlike adoption in most Western legal systems; it establishes guardianship instead. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises Kafala as a valid form of alternative care for children who cannot be raised by their birth families.
Vallvey traced the origin of Kafala to verses of the Quran's Sura Al-Nisa, or The Women, the fourth chapter of the Quran, which she said established a moral and legal duty to protect the finances of vulnerable children. She noted that the Prophet Muhammad adopted Zayd, a freed slave, in keeping with Arab custom of the time, and that Zayd was later able to reclaim the name of his biological father.
She wrote that Morocco operates a judicialised model of Kafala, under which the state is, in theory, responsible for guaranteeing the rights of the child. One strict requirement, she said, is that anyone who takes in a child under Kafala must be Muslim.
A third end up on the street, groups say
Vallvey cited organisations that work with these children as saying that at least a third of them, once they reach adulthood, fail to adapt and end up living on the street, a pattern she said repeats itself both in Morocco and in Spain.
She contrasted this with the Quran's own instructions on the treatment of orphans, citing Sura 2, Ayah 220, which she said calls for improving the situation of orphans and instructs believers who take orphans into their households to treat them as brothers.
The column, titled Los niños abandonados (The Abandoned Children), ran under the heading Top Mantra in the paper's Opinion section and was filed under the topics of childhood, Spain's Minor's Law, illegal immigration and Morocco.
