Kaspi Psycho-Neurological State Institution was a residential institution for up to 100 abandoned children with intellectual and physical disabilities.

In the winter of 1993-94, 24 Georgian children with intellectual or physical disabilities died of neglect, cold and malnourishment at Kaspi residential state institution.  Tragically, more innocent lives were lost for the same reasons over the following years. Such children were often regarded as a burden and a source of shame by their families, who received little support from the State.

During Soviet times the state encouraged families to place children with disabilities in residential care. Children with special needs suffered in a society which lacked awareness of progressive thinking about disability. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union conditions in state institutions deteriorated sharply for lack of state funding.

Most children with severe special needs lived in dilapidated, ill-equipped, remote institutions, where they suffered from hunger, cold and illness and were treated largely as undeserving of normal human warmth, love and care.

“It is very moving, and chastening, to be told of the desperate plight of many “forgotten children” of the Caucasus. We don’t need to comb through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: our every instinct tells us that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance.”

Damian Grammaticas, BBC Correspondent in Moscow following his visit to Kaspi in July 2005

“Kaspi is one of the saddest places I have ever seen”

Lawrence Kerr, Deputy Chief of Mission, US Embassy Tbilisi from July 1994-July 1997 and Charge until May 1998

"The situation of the Kaspi children is the most desperate I have seen in my long career in the Third World. Even in Vietnam, in the midst of a savage civil war, children were not abandoned in this way."

Professor Alfred W. Brann M.D., Emory University School of Medicine

“The care and nuturing of the disabled child is the protection for each one of us that no one will walk into our house and will take us away”

Professor Leslie Rubin M.D, Director Center for Developmental Medicine
Marcus Institute, Associate Professor Pediatrics, Emory University, Atlanta, USA

“I could not believe children were being treated in this way and was impatient to leave Kaspi and begin the process of helping to find ways of getting these children into a safer and more nurturing environment”.

Dr. Akram Ali Eltom has written extensively on child care and authored “Georgia’s Policy Reform Study on Institutionalized Children”
(UNICEF, May 1998)

“Regardless of the source from which financial support comes at the policy reform, restructuring or direct implementation level, it is crucial that it be utilized in show-casing some successful pilot projects involving combined community-based/institutionalized care of children under difficult circumstances, using various intervention approaches that serve as models from which lessons are eventually drawn for replication and expansion within Georgia.”