Samuel and Solomon, lifelong friends, were separated when their orphanage closed [Anais Lopez/Al Jazeera]
Karongi, Rwanda - Four years ago, Rwanda took the radical decision to begin shutting down all of its orphanages - a move that would have made it the first country in Africa to do so.
The 1994 genocide, in which almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred, had left the country with thousands of orphans.
Following the killings, foreign aid organisations set up dozens of orphanages, with the number of institutions in the country rising from three to 34.
In 2012, the government announced that by the end of 2014 all of these orphanages would be closed.
The move followed a United Nations declaration that every child has the right to grow up in a family, and research showed that 70 percent of the children in care in Rwanda still had families.
The closures policy, whose deadline was extended in December 2014 and has still not been met, has been fraught with difficulty, however, both for the children and the institutions raising them.
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