“My father died a long time ago,” says an 11-year old girl from South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province.

“My mother died last year,” she says. “That will always stay in me because the life that I am living is not a good one.”

While AIDS deaths are not notifiable and stigmatisation in South Africa is high, researchers for the Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security (ACESS), believe the girl is an AIDS orphan. She is one of 1.5 million who have lost their parents to a disease that is beginning to peak and so kill off infected South Africans.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS infection.

AIDS is the latest challenge to face South Africa’s poor children – officially there are 14 million children living in poverty, though ACESS says the figure is much higher. Spokesperson Laura Polecutt says the figure is closer to 18 million children and adds that they face a series of challenges: the inaccessibility of child grants; family breakdown; hunger and the difficulties of schooling in an era of cost-recovery and declining resources.

Recent research into children’s rights found that many children were being excluded from school because they could not pay fees, though legislation says that no pupils should be refused admission for not being able to pay. But school-teachers and principals pressurised by cost-recovery in turn put pressure on learners.

Said a10-year-old girl from Limpopo province, on the border with Zimbabwe: “My problem is that I am not having pens. The teacher sends us home to ask for school fees and my aunt doesn’t have money to pay.”

Government has started an inquiry into the affordability of school fees. It is still ongoing, though ACESS wants quicker action. “It should be noted that despite a fairly high (school) enrolment rate, the recent financial review of education reported that there are still about 300,000 children not in educational institutions,” says Polecutt.

Social Development minister Zola Skweyiya, who is leading a Child Protection Week which coincided with Children’s Day on Jun. 1, has acknowledged the problem is immense, but says government’s plans have renewed impetus. “Government is taking steps to the quickest possible progressive realisation of the constitutional rights of children.”

Vulnerable children under seven years old receive a monthly grant of R160 (about 22 U.S. dollars), though the child support grant, as it is called, has been dogged by problems since its inception in 1999. It is administratively tedious with many eligible children falling outside the net. “They wrote my birth certificate wrong – they put 1998 and it should be 1988 so I cannot get a grant as they say I am not old enough yet. I have tried to fix the birth certificate many times but it is difficult,” says a child from Mpumalanga province. Caught in such tangled red tape, the payment of the grant has only reached a small percentage of eligible children, though Skweyiya says an effort to sign up children is bearing fruit. “From a mere 60,000 in 1999, we now have 2.6 million children registered for the child support grant.”

And the net of children who receive support will be widened even more from this year because government has lifted the age for payment of the grant from seven years old to 14 years old.

This is a victory for organisations like ACESS which campaigned for the increase. Though they believe the grant should be payable to children up to 18 years old, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) agreed to lift it to include children aged 14 and younger. The increase will be phased in over three years at a cost of R11billion (1.5 billion U.S. dollars).

Research has shown that where the child support grants are paid, they are, together with old age pensions the lifeboat for many rural areas – one in three South Africans are unemployed so the grants are essential for more than just the old and the young.

In addition to getting more children to sign up for the grant, the week is also being used to teach families to spot and prevent child abuse; to investigate child rape and to publicise services for children who are so-called “AIDS orphans”. About R65 million (around 8.7 million U.S. dollars) has been set aside for care for them, though social workers say it is a tiny percentage of what is necessary to stave off the impact of the epidemic on children.