“If only I can stop sewing for a month, my cough will come down … I spend the money from my sewing for buying food and making sandwiches for my grandchildren to take to school,” says an old South African woman captured on video while working at an archaic sewing machine.
A 57-year old Ugandan man — who lost four of his children to Aids — tells of how he is looking after 14 grandchildren, seven of whom need to have school fees paid.
This video was screened at a three-day conference on ageing in Africa, which opened in the South African commercial hub of Johannesburg on Wednesday.
“In parts of Africa, the burden placed on grandparents — especially grandmothers — is overwhelming. Reports indicate that it’s not unusual for grandmothers to have lost several of their own children to HIV/Aids, and then to gather their various orphaned grandchildren,” said Robert Huber of the United Nations Division for Social Policy and Development.
“Increased loneliness, isolation, ostracism and the strain created by the burden of caring for homes and grandchildren left behind exact a heavy cost on older persons,” he added.
Huber told more than 200 delegates that many developing countries are unable to collect enough tax revenues to fund social and health-care services that cater for older persons, who have few other resources to draw on.
“Older women are particularly affected. They lack resources and opportunities, suffer higher incidences of disability and abuse — and carry the main responsibility for care in the family,” he said.
The UN defines “older persons” as those of 60 years and more. Worldwide, there are about 600-million older persons; this number is expected to double by 2025 and to rise to nearly two billion by 2050. The vast majority of these people will reside in the developing world — many of them in Africa, according to the UN.
At present, just one out of every 20 Africans is an older person. Although ageing will not be as swift in Africa as in other developing regions, in the coming decades the percentage of older persons is expected to increase from 6% to 12% of the population, Huber said.
“The African continent is the youngest in the world,” noted Joseph Troisi, deputy director of the UN International Institute on Ageing, which is based in Malta.
“But Africa is also at a critical turning point,” he added. “The African family is changing, and more and more people are spending a lot of time at work, leaving the burden of looking after their children on grandparents.”
This, combined with the responsibilities imposed by the Aids pandemic, has made setting the threshold for old age at 60 appear somewhat arbitrary in Africa.
“Although we use the threshold of 60 years to describe older persons, for many people in parts of the developing world old age comes earlier. Those worn down by the physical wear and tear of poverty and disease may face dependency at an earlier age,” said Huber.
“In parts of Africa, people much older than 60 years continue to work long hours to try to maintain families torn apart by the devastating effects of war, economic deterioration and HIV/Aids.”
Vusi Madonsela, South Africa’s Director General of Social Development, urged African governments to take proper account of the aged in their national policies.
“Professionals should not try to manage older people; they must … enable older people to manage their own services,” he said during the opening address of the conference.
He warned that the UN’s millennium development goal of halving poverty by 2015 will not be achieved in sub-Saharan Africa unless older people are part of the policies and programmes intended to accomplish this.
Eight millennium development goals (MDGs) were set by world leaders at the UN in New York in 2000, in a bid to improve global living conditions. The MDGs also include pledges to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters and to achieve universal primary education by 2015.
More than 350-million people, or half of Africa’s population, live below the poverty line of less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank.
Adelaide Tambo, wife of the late Oliver Tambo — former president of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress — told of how she had encountered abuse of older persons while doing her thesis on Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago.
“I found [that] people suffering from Alzheimer’s were put in the asylum ward. Others who developed advanced Alzheimer’s were locked up. I said, ‘Why?'” Tambo told delegates.
She also urged the younger generation to tap into the experience of older people.
“Let’s learn from the older people — let’s not push them aside. That’s where our riches are,” she said. “They have got experience: experience of life, experience of bringing up children.
“When we were growing up, we were taught that when you are in the bus and an older person is standing you must offer the seat to him or her. This doesn’t happen these days.”
Added Huber: “Societies can no longer afford to consider their older citizens unproductive. Nowhere is this truer than in Africa, where many older persons continue to make enormous contributions to the well-being of their families and communities.” — IPS