Burden by Design: Autism or Abandonment?
Study indicts African autistic children, not inadequate systems
Anthony et al.’s scoping review, Caregiving for children with autism in Africa: A scoping review of socioeconomic impact with a call for intersectoral collaboration (2025, European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Calabar and collaborators), says it plainly: the demands of autism cause a significant financial burden for caregivers in Africa.
Read that again. Autism, not austerity. Autism, not collapsed roads. Autism, not absent policy. The sentence pins centuries of inequity on the backs of children. That is not description. That is indictment — of the wrong party.
Study indicts African autistic children, not inadequate systems
What the authors actually report:
- Families paying out of pocket for therapy and school.
- Jobs lost because workplaces won’t flex.
- Roads too broken to reach a clinic.
- Mothers isolated, blamed, sometimes abandoned.
In other words, the paper implies that autistic children in Africa are the root cause of all that misery simply because they exist. To be fair, the review does acknowledge broken infrastructure, absent policy, and the need for intersectoral reform — yet even while naming those systemic failures, its headline framing still pins the hardship on autism itself. To claim otherwise is not just sloppy framing. It is a violence of attribution.
By writing autism as the cause, the review launders political failure. That move is not neutral; it prepares the ground for NGOs to swoop in as saviors, gives states cover to do less, and flags autistic African life as a deficit — and one that supposedly explains poverty.
Notice who is absent. Fathers, mostly. But more glaring: autistic people themselves. Not cited, not interviewed, not framing the terms of the debate. Their silence here is not oversight. It is institutional erasure built into the design.
This is why the harm that radiates from this study like a signal flare is real. Not coercion on the page, not eugenics in the abstract. But a quieter violence: turning inequity into destiny, turning children into burdens, turning mothers into case studies of strain. This is how deficit logic travels — across borders, into policy briefs, into donor strategies. Once published, it will not stay in the journal. It will be quoted to justify why families are always behind, why NGOs must intervene, why autistic life is unsustainable without external saviors.
Better questions the authors never asked:
- What if autism were treated as neutral difference and inequity as cause?
- What if autistic Africans defined quality of life instead of being reduced to costs?
- What would collaboration look like if autistic people held the pen, not just the burden?
Until then, the crisis is misnamed. Africa doesn’t have an autism crisis. It has an abandonment crisis. Autism is only the mirror. And this review chose to break the mirror rather than face what it reflects.