Adopting Parents To Get One Month Paid Leave

Parents who are in the process of adopting children will now enjoy fully paid leave after President Uhuru Kenyatta assented to the Employment (Amendment) Bill of 2019.

This is according to new amendments to the Employment Act signed yesterday by President Uhuru Kenyatta that seeks to give parents enough time to make the necessary arrangements.

The changes exclude parents of children born through surrogacy after President Kenyatta declined the provision on grounds that Kenya lacks a substantive legal and regulatory framework to protect all parties within the surrogacy arrangement.

“The Employment (Amendment) Bill, 2019 seeks to amend the Employment Act, No. 11 of 2007 to afford a one-month pre-adoptive leave with full pay to parents who apply for the adoption of children,” explains a brief memorandum on the Bill.

Kenya’s law allows a fully paid, two-week paternity break for fathers and a three-month maternity leave for those who nurse their own pregnancies.

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Many companies frown upon these breaks, viewing them as an additional labor cost that sometimes forces them to hire temporary workers.

Parents going through an adoption process will now notify their employers of the intention at least 14 days before the adoption date together with relevant adoption documents.

“The pre-adoptive leave granted to an adoptive parent shall guarantee such adoptive parents an uninterrupted opportunity to make all the necessary arrangements that may be required before the adoptive parent takes full custody and responsibility for the adopted child,” explains the new law proposed by Gilgil MP Martha Wangari.

President Uhuru Kenyatta also signed into law the Business Laws (Amendment) Bill of 2021 which amends several statutes to ease doing business.

Among them are changes to the Small Claims Court Act, 2016, which fast-tracks the handling of business disputes valued at no more than 200,000 shillings by providing a sixty-day timeline for adjudication of the disagreements.

In 2019, the government announced an immediate ban on the adoption of Kenyan children by foreign nationals following a Cabinet meeting, directing the Labour and Social Protection Ministry to formulate a policy to regulate the adoption of children by foreign nationals.

The announcement came a few weeks after Kenyan authorities took a three-year-old from an American couple named as the legal guardians, in a high-profile case that grabbed international headlines.