Africa, Development & Aid, Headlines, Health

HEALTH-AFRICA: A "How To" Manual for Churches Which Help AIDS Orphans

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Feb 12 2004 (IPS) - A Baltimore-based aid agency, World Relief, this week issued a guide in Kenya to assist churches with caring for AIDS orphans in Africa.

Entitled "Our Children: The Church Cares for Children Affected by AIDS", the 92-page document underlines the importance of helping orphans – or children who are caring for parents with AIDS-related illnesses – to continue their education.

"You can use your church building as a classroom and church members as teachers to teach children who cannot go to school because they are caring for their parents," says the manual.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), fewer than one million children under the age of 15 in sub-Saharan Africa had lost parents to the AIDS pandemic in 1990. By the end of 2001, this figure had risen to 11 million – and UNICEF believes it could double by 2010. The World Health Organisation estimates that about 30 million of the 42 million people infected with HIV around the world, are in Africa.

"The government is deeply concerned about our children missing school, burying parents and skipping childhood because the demands of heading households have pressed them to adulthood," said Lina Kilimo, a minister in the office of Kenya’s Vice President.

She added that even though free primary education was introduced last year, thousands of children have not been able to take advantage of the programme because they have to nurse ailing parents.

The government’s 2003 guidelines on caring for orphans and other children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS predict that the number of AIDS orphans in Kenya could increase to 2.2 million by 2010 in a worst-case scenario.

Speaking at the launch of the manual on Tuesday (Feb. 10), Meredith Long – World Relief’s International Health Programmes Director – also noted that Africa’s extended families are crucial when it comes to caring for AIDS orphans.

"The African community is one of compassion, a community of extended families, a caring community. I think it is essential that AIDS orphans are cared for within their families," he told IPS.

While children who are taken in by orphanages undoubtedly have an advantage over AIDS orphans who fend for themselves on the streets, some claim that orphanage life deprives children of love and personal attention.

However, modernisation has taken its toll on the extended family: in many instances these units are no longer as cohesive as they used to be. Anglican minister Nick Ajuoga speaks somewhat wistfully of a time when "The extended family would ensure that children were in the safe hands of caring family members who would somehow fill the gap of the missing parents."

"The African community then believed that children belonged to the whole community, and that they would not remain dejected just because of the death of their parents," he told IPS.

The World Relief publication was developed by AIDS workers from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and Mozambique, all of them countries with high levels of HIV infection.