A Kenyan judge ordered the government and the East African country’s oldest and largest Aids orphanage Wednesday to try to work out a deal to get primary schools to admit children in infected with HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
The Nyumbani home, which receives most of its funding from groups in the United States, sought a court order to force the Ministry of Education and the Attorney General’s office to provide free primary school education for the children at the home.
Nyumbani attorney Ababu Namwamba said the court had given the Ministry of Education, the Nairobi City Directorate of Education and the Attorney General’s office one day to work out a deal with the orphanage.
”Our demand is simple – we want these children to be in class,” Namwamba said. ”If we don’t get this, we’ll be back in court on Friday.”
He said Nyumbani would be satisfied with nothing less than a declaration from the Ministry of Education banning discrimination against HIV-positive children in Kenya’s public schools.
All the parties will meet Thursday at the Ministry of Education to discuss the matter, Namwamba said.
Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment after the court hearing, but on Tuesday Karega Mutahi, a senior education ministry official, said that it was the government’s policy to give ”equitable and nondiscriminatory access to education” and that no child was to be denied access on the basis of health, including HIV status.
Namwamba said he doesn’t expect any resistance from government officials.
”I expect them to place a concrete offer on the table,” Namwamba said, adding that he thought the ministry and the city hadn’t really taken Nyumbani’s complaint seriously. ”Although we have a new government, there is still the mentality of the old. Our coming to court has shocked them into waking up that this is a serious matter.”
He called Judge Martha Kome’s order ”a fresh development, a new way of doing things, and we hope that it heralds a new dawn of a judiciary committed to listening to every person that comes before it.”
Rev. Angelo D’Agostino, a Roman Catholic priest and founder of Nyumbani, said five Nairobi primary schools have refused to admit children from the orphanage because they are HIV-positive despite the enactment of a law that provides for free primary education for all Kenyan children.
”Once they (the schools) find the child is from Nyumbani, they find some sort of excuse like they’re too full, they don’t have any room or whatever, so that’s where we have the problem,” D’Agostino told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
The promise of free primary education was one of the key election pledges of an opposition alliance that won historic elections in December 2002. And since taking office, President Mwai Kibaki’s government has cited the provision of free primary schooling as one of its main successes.
Kibaki has also pledged to lead the battle against Aids, a disease that he said kills 400 people a day in the East African nation.
The Chambers of Justice, a Kenyan human rights foundation, supported Nyumbani’s case and pointed out that with Kenya’s high HIV rate many of the children already attending classes quite likely have the virus.
The new school year in Kenya began Monday. — Sapa