She was just four when we met, with deep brown eyes, short dark hair and a missing smile.

I knew her as Alisha, a civil war orphan living with five other little girls in the orphanage that I had co-founded in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2006.

We were told her parents had died in the war and that she had been brought to Kathmandu, and that we shouldn't ask questions about her parents or family, or how she had come to be living in an orphanage.

We kept our questions to ourselves and heaped our love upon her instead.

Over the years, Alisha and I grew very close.

She was my sponsor child and I visited every six months on behalf of Forget Me Not, the charity we had formed to support the orphanage in Nepal.

We regarded each other as family.

Alisha was four years old when Kate first met her. ( Supplied )

Many times as I held and comforted her, I wondered about her parents and how she had ended up in my arms instead of theirs.

A shock discovery changed everything

Five years later, I was standing on deep red soil in Kampala, Uganda, in front of a group of children that we had just removed from an orphanage.

Forget Me Not had started funding an orphanage of 39 children in a dire state in 2010.

Our first audit had picked up some low-level financial irregularities and we had worked with the government to close the orphanage and remove the children.

Nothing could have prepared me for what we would discover that day.

As we talked with the children about our plan of where we might locate a new orphanage and home for them, they started asking whether they could simply go home now.

They told us about their mothers and fathers, who were very much alive and, it seemed, looking for their children.

The children asked to make phone calls to speak with their parents. We spoke to some of the parents who told us they had been looking for their children for years.

It turned out these children weren't orphans at all, but rather had been recruited from their families to the orphanage by a pastor under the guise that she was taking them to the capital city to attend school.

Kate van Doore with kids removed from an orphanage in Uganda. ( Supplied )

Once in the city, she established an orphanage, changed the children's names and invented stories for them to tell foreign volunteers and donors about their orphanhood.

They became "paper orphans". Orphans by virtue of their falsified paperwork only.

Forget Me Not quickly established a family support program enabling the children to return home to their families and ensuring they could access what they needed in order to stay there.

Finding out the truth about Alisha

We soon started investigating whether the same thing had happened in our orphanage in Nepal where Alisha lived.

I was stunned to find out that Alisha's parents were alive and her family was intact.

Father, mother, sister and brother, all wondering what had happened to their four-year-old sent away to school.

Alisha's real name is Jikten.

It had been changed when she was brought to the orphanage by her father's cousin who had told her mother that he would take her to school in Kathmandu.

Her mother had desperately searched for her to no avail, as she did not speak the dialect and Jikten's name and details had been changed.

Eight years after she left, Jikten returned home to her loving family with no financial support required, just monitoring.

At the time, her grandmother said, "When Jikten was returned to us, it was as if gold was laid at our feet".

Alisha went home to live with her parents and is now studying to be a lawyer. ( Foreign Correspondent: Alex Barry )

She now studies in college and is hoping to be a lawyer.

Jikten was just one of the 8 million children across the world that are growing up in orphanages.

Eighty per cent of children living in orphanages have one or both parents alive that could look after their child, if supported.

It costs 90 per cent less to keep a child at home with their family than it does to keep them in an orphanage.

Children belong with their families

Eighty years of research shows that institutional care harms children.

The international guidelines on alternative care state that children should only ever be in residential care temporarily, and it should not be regarded as a permanent solution.

Children who are raised in orphanages face significant disadvantages in adulthood, including increased likelihood of imprisonment, homelessness and suicide.

Here in Australia, we know the devastating effects of institutional care.

Yet, we suspend that knowledge when it comes to spending our money and volunteer time supporting overseas orphanages.

Visiting and volunteering in orphanages cause more harm than good.

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It compounds issues for very vulnerable children who experience broken attachments with volunteers over and over again.

It also provides an income stream that has resulted in orphanages being run like businesses.

In some cases, children are produced as orphans and exploited for profit to keep up with the demand to visit and volunteer from foreigners.

Australia has officially recognised this practice of orphanage trafficking as a form of modern slavery.

If you give to orphanages, you might be doing harm

If you are supporting an orphanage, like I was, then please ask the orphanage some basic questions about how they work to ensure children can grow up at home in their family.

Ask them whether and how they are registered, and whether they comply with the United Nations Guidelines on Alternative Care.

Ask them how they are focused on supporting children in families, not orphanages.

Finally, remember that only the most vulnerable children should ever end up in any form of institutional care, even for a short period.

Please think about the impact of volunteering and visiting in orphanages.

Australian lawyer Kate van Doore operated an orphanage before making a shock discovery. ( Foreign Correspondent: Alex Barry )

In Australia, we do not allow visitors and volunteers to care for our most vulnerable children.

We wouldn't allow a continual rotation of visitors through a facility housing vulnerable children, so why do we think it's an acceptable holiday activity?

We need to stop doing things in other countries that we wouldn't be allowed to in our own.

No such thing as a good orphanage

No child should grow up in an orphanage, no matter what country they grow up in. Research shows that there is no such thing as a "good" orphanage.

Institutional care cannot replicate family care, even where children are provided with excellent facilities, like they were in the orphanages we funded.

As hard as it was to realise, our good intentions could not match the love of Jikten's family.

Many children are taken from mountain villages to orphanages in cities like Kathmandu. ( Foreign Correspondent: Alex Barry )

Forget Me Not Australia now works in partnership with governments to close orphanages and reunite children with their families.

For me, every child is Jikten.

My work and research on how children are trafficked into orphanages for exploitation and profit are because of her, and for her.

She is home, where she belongs, but there are 8 million reasons to keep going.

Kate van Doore is an international children's rights lawyer and academic at Griffith University. She is also the co-founder of Forget Me Not.