CCAA and Child Placements – How it Works and Where we are in the Process

CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) is an agency within China that is responsible for children in Child Welfare Institutes (orphanages), and for domestic and international adoption. Once CCAA receives applications from families who want to adopt, they "review" them, in the order they were received. After they have been reviewed and approved, CCAA will then "match" an available child with the prospective adopters. Once the matching has occurred, CCAA will send the prospective adopters information about the child, called a "referral," which usually includes photographs and the child's health information.

The most up to date information from CCAA says that applications have been reviewed through April 30, 2007 and that children have been placed (or referred) through March 14, 2006. What does this mean for our family? Well, our application was received by CCAA and "logged in" on March 29, 2006. Our application has already been reviewed. It has been taking CCAA about one month to process a week's work of applications. So if it takes CCAA about two months to process two week's worth of applications, this means that we could possibly get our referral three months from now.

Of course, nothing is written in stone. Things could either speed up or slow down. But we are hopeful that things stay on track and that we will be hearing something soon!