Each year over 18,000 adoptive families from various countries around the World adopt children abroad. Assistance in this overwhelming task is provided by approximately 400 private inter-country adoption intermediaries. With the number of these rapidly growing, the task of selecting the right one is becoming a challenge on it's own. All information is provided by adoptive families who volunteer to register their adoptions on this Registry. Unlike some other similar registries, ICAR is fully automated, requiring no manual publishing or censorship.
Any information entered by adoptive families is accessible to other users immediately.
Once your record is published the database e-mails you a confirmation message reminding you of the personal password that you entered. For example, you can find out which agencies are more successful in placing infants, or which agencies placed the highest number of children from a certain country during the last six months. They are designed to encourage registration of those families who for some reason may prefer to keep their last names private. Also, those who prefer not to be bothered by reference requests, can keep their e-mail addresses private. Even though such clients could not be used to obtain more detailed information on their agencies, their listing would still be helpful to other users in order to determine the volume of adoptions by their agency, the types of referrals, the countries of operation, and the time frames of adoption processes.