Adoption Process - Summary

While you are undergoing assessment, we can help you more if you complete our pre-registration to receive further information on your country of choice, to discuss your personal situation with our staff, to keep updated about any changes in that country's process, and to book your place in our system.  It also gives you access to our Members only page on this website for your country of choice. For Thailand, pre-registration is required; for all other countries it is optional.

Remember to check you meet the requirements for your country of choice before pre-registering.

There is no requirement for you to already have links to the culture of the country you wish to apply to, although for India it does give you an advantage. You do need to be able to help your child learn about their heritage, to integrate that with your family culture and you must respect their heritage. Take a look at resources that will help you to build your child's awareness of their heritage.

This is the first step towards intercountry adoption. This step is done by the New Zealand Government Department of Child, Youth and Family (CYF); ICANZ is not an Assessment Service and does not carry out this step.

You'll need to attend an education course on adoption. This course starts with a short information session, covering fostering, long term guardianship ("Home for Life"), NZ adoption as well as intercountry adoption. You'll undergo police, medical and referee reports to check your legal eligibility and then attend 3 workshops, referred to as Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. Be aware that there are two versions of Day 3 - one to prepare you to go into the pool for local "Home for Life" children and one to prepare you to adopt a child or children intercountry. Make sure you know which one you've chosen to attend.

These workshops are followed by social worker interviews to assess your suitability to become an adoptive parent. You need to tell the social worker that you wish to use ICANZ as your placement service to facilitate the adoption overseas.

A CYF social worker will then write a document called a "Homestudy Report". 

For some countries you'll also need a report from a psychologist.

The CYF social worker will send your homestudy report to the New Zealand Central Authority for adoption (NZCA), for final approval to adopt a certain number of children, of particular age range, from a particular country.

The NZCA will then send your homestudy report and associated documents to ICANZ provided you've told the social worker you wish to use ICANZ. We'll then work on your behalf to prepare and application and make the arrangements that lead to you being offered a child to adopt into your family (see below).

Post-Placement Reports  In all cases you'll have visits by a social worker, in most cases from ICANZ, for Philippines, from CYF. This may be required in order to finalize the adoption, or to report to the foreign country.  The summary we've given you here is a generalized overview. As each country varies in its process, we give you more details as you work through the process with us.