RIGHTS: Africa’s Forgotten AIDs Orphans

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

JOHANNESBURG, Sep 2 2002 (IPS) - û By the end of 2000, 13 million children in the world had lost their mother or both parents to AIDS. That 75 percent of these children lived in sub-Saharan Africa indicates the heavy toll the disease is taking in this region of the developing world.

Mozambique is one nation that has already gone through an orphan crisis this past decade, when the conclusion of a two-decade civil war left thousands of children without parents who died in the conflict. Those children are now adults, and some who have contracted AIDS will be leaving behind a new generation of parentless children.

Uganda is a nation where AIDS fatalities have peaked, but the resulting social impact has brought a generation gap. Rural homesteads are populated with children living with ageing grandparents. The young adult and middle-aged adult members, who would normally support both the child and elder generations, are nowhere to be seen.

Such a scenario is becoming more common in Botswana, the African nation with the largest incident of HIV infections.

ôThe dilemma of AIDS orphans is one of the great looming humanitarian crises in African countries, and the enormity of the problem is only now being recognised,” says Alan Brody, the Swaziland country representative for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The good news, says Brody and other administrators of child-oriented NGOs and social welfare groups, is that attention is being given to orphans as never before.

In Swaziland, that means a recognition that the social safety net provided by the traditional extended family is no longer able to cope with the heavy new burden of so-called AIDS orphans.

Albert Shabangu, Minster of Housing and Human Development, puts the crisis in personal terms, ôHow can the old grandparents expect to start parenting small children so late in life? They are frail, they are at a time when they expect to slow down and perhaps have their needs taken care of. In Swaziland, the old folk live in the countryside, and poverty is common. The grandparents cannot go back to work to support perhaps many grandchildren who have nowhere else to turn.”

The World Summit on Sustainable Development’s meeting place of Johannesburg has focused global attention on the plight of African societies. ôMany international news organisations are tired of the delegates’ squabbling over protocols, and they are using the opportunity to go out and see how ordinary Africans are in need of sustainable development programmes,” says Sherry Knight, a news producer from the United States.

Knight noted that the most-watched news programme in the United States, the CBS Evening News, noted that the World Summit on Sustainable Development was in progress, but devoted its coverage to a story about AIDS orphans.

ôOf all the sad by-products of the AIDS crisis in Africa, which includes the tragic loss of life and the economic hardships, the most poignant are the stories about children who have been left as orphans because their parents have died,” says Dianne Levine, another American correspondent.

Levine says that viewers worldwide respond to the plight of AIDS orphans. ôWith AIDS victims, fairly or unfairly, there is always a doubt about culpability. Did they ignore safe-sex information and have intercourse without condoms, or otherwise engage in unsafe sex? But with the orphans, there is a clearly a population of blameless victims who desperately require attention,” she says, sounding more like an impassioned social worker than a neutral journalist.

Father Larry McDonnell, who runs the Manzini Youth Centre that includes one of Swaziland’s oldest orphanages says, ôWhat is needed first of all is a way to identify orphans, and who need a place to live, food and medical assistance, and a way to continue or start their education. This is a long-term commitment until they are children no longer, but self-sustaining adults.”

Institutional establishments like orphanages cannot handle the great influx of new children, McDonnell notes. Swaziland’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare reports that by 2010 about 15 percent of the entire country’s population will be children who have been orphaned due to AIDS. This will represent a challenge to the economy of a country where two-thirds of people live below the poverty line.

ôOrphanages cannot be built fast enough, so we must find another way,” McDonnell says. ôOne innovation is a programme called OrphanAID. It is community-based, in rural areas. The idea is to identify children at risk, and provide them with caregivers in their community. We don’t want to uproot the children from their familiar surroundings.”

The programme is enlisting the assistance of the 350 chiefs under whom most Swazis reside as peasant farmers. By tradition, a field adjacent to a chief ‘s residence is reserved for crops to feed widows and orphans. Community members volunteer their labour to tend this field. The custom has diminished in recent years, but the new crisis of AIDS orphans is reviving the ôlusito (assistance) fields” in some areas.

The United Nations Human Development Report 2002 makes mention of Africa’s orphan dilemma as a new wrinkle in many countries’ ability to eradicate poverty. Not only are African nations robbed of many of their most economically productive workers and managers, the deceased also leave behind hundreds of thousands of children who require state assistance.

But Hannie Dlamini, president of the AIDS counselling service SASO, says, ôWe are aware of the other victims of AIDS, the orphans, as never before. We can no longer focus support strictly on people with HIV and AIDS. We realise the children must be considered. All the NGOs and national governments are determined not to overlook the children.”