HEALTH-ZAMBIA: AIDS Orphans Join The Rank Of Street Children

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jowie Mwiinga

LUSAKA, Dec 18 1999 (IPS) - They swarm the central business district of Lusaka like invading locust, hungry, aggressive and destructive. They move around in menacing little bands, darting away for cover when the police appear, only to re-emerge with renewed determination when the coast is clear.

They are Zambia’s AIDS orphans – so it has been assumed for years.

According to official statistics, Zambia has the highest proportion of children orphaned by AIDS in the world, after Uganda. By the end of 1997, some 360,000 children – or nine percent of Zambian children under 15 – had been orphaned by AIDS, and the numbers continued to increase rapidly.

Social workers link the growing number of street children in the urban centres – 35,000 in the capital Lusaka alone in 1991, and twice as many today – to the AIDS epidemic.

However, new studies by the government and development agencies suggest that the growing number of destitute children is not necessarily a consequence of AIDS.

The latest UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report, made available to IPS this week, for example, estimates that half of the 75,000 street children in Lusaka are not orphans.

Meanwhile, a new official government figures suggest that destitute children, with parents, are just as badly off as are orphaned ones; 73 percent of children with both parents alive live below the poverty datum line, compared to 75 percent of orphans.

“These problems (of food shortages, poor health, inadequate education, clothing and bedding) actually affect all the children, orphan and non-orphan, and indeed all the community members,” the government’s 1999 Situation Analysis of Orphans and Vulnerable Children says. “What is special about the orphans is the issue of lack of love, exclusion or discrimination”.

According to the report, many orphans understand that their economic hardships are not exclusive to them. “We don’t mind not having enough food or clothing. After all, everybody else is in this situation because of poverty,” it quotes a school dropout in the central town of Kabwe as saying.

“What we mind is being regarded different by the rest of the family,” adds the boy.

Analysts say the misconception that destitution among Zambian children is AIDS-induced may be diverting scarce resources from other areas of development in Africa.

Currently, Zambia, with about a million people living with AIDS, has 19 registered non-governmental organisations whose core mission is to help alleviate the plight of AIDS orphans. Few such organisations, if any, exist to address the concerns of destitute non-orphaned children.

“We face the danger of focusing all our energies and resources on AIDS-related issues to the detriment of other developmental options,” says a Lusaka-based journalist.

However, the awareness that there are other development challenges beyond AIDS appears to be slowly registering among the concerned in society.

“Although communities begin at looking at the needs of orphans, they soon reformulate their criteria to include other vulnerable children, namely those who are extremely poor,” says UNICEF in a report entitled, ‘Children Orphaned by AIDS’.