As the Aids pandemic cuts a deadly swathe across Southern Africa, a multidisciplinary research team is looking at developing intervention strategies to care for affected children and orphans.
”The main aim of the project is to improve the social conditions, health, space for personal development and quality of life of vulnerable children and orphans,” said Dr Donald Skinner, a member of the research team from the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).
Skinner said the five-year, donor-funded project is concentrating its work on Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and will extend to Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland.
He said the project, currently half completed, aims to support families, households and communities coping with the ”increased burden” of caring for affected and vulnerable children.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimates that there will be 11,2-million orphans by 2010 in the Southern African Development Community, with more than half as a result of Aids.
Of the six participating countries, South Africa has the most Aids orphans, with estimates from 2003 suggesting there were 2,2-million orphans, half of whom had Aids.
Skinner said the HSRC, for example, will together with research partners in the participating countries develop interventions focusing on health, nutrition, psycho-social care and income support.
A recent meeting in Gaborone, Botswana, considered evidence gathered so far, and started a process of developing best-practice models for future interventions.
Skinner said key among these interventions will be poverty alleviation, the levels of which he described as ”humungous”.
”It is vitally important to have interventions to change the behaviour of youth towards safer sex. Also, in South Africa particularly, we need critical intervention in the area of child sexual and physical abuse, and gender violence.”
Skinner said one problem that is likely to arise throughout the region relates to the insufficient households in which orphans can be placed to receive care, with experts reluctant to create more orphanages. Orphanages have been found internationally to be ”problematic places” for the care of children.
He said another problem is finding appropriate caregivers for vulnerable children.
The problem centres on the number of children needing care and that the resources of those who are willing to care for children are rapidly being exhausted.
Skinner said it was decided to combine vulnerable children and those orphaned by Aids in the strategy, in a bid to prevent further discrimination against those orphaned by Aids.
”Orphans will have suffered the trauma of living with a sick parent and also the emotionally draining experience of living with a dying parent.
”Because of the difficulty and inadvisability of targeting and, therefore, singling out children orphaned by Aids and exposing them to stigmatisation, it was recommended that programmes focus on all vulnerable children.”
Programmes will look at the broader ambit of vulnerable children, including those living with sick parents, children being cared for by aged or frail caregivers, and children in households who themselves look after orphaned children.
Skinner said programmes will target children in areas with a high rate of HIV/Aids, with eligibility criteria for entry into the programmes not based on citizenship but on need.
All vulnerable children and orphans under the age of 18 years will be targeted.
Douglas Webb of Nairobi-based Unicef said the priority in 2005 is to ensure financial support for the national plans of action of 16 African countries, including South Africa.
”Collectively, the budgets of the plans currently total around $600-million per year. The budgets are evolving constantly and are likely to average around $25-million to $30-million per plan per year, once the budget finalisation exercise is completed in August 2005.”
Webb said the 16 national plans of action for orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV/Aids are currently being finalised by ”country-level rapid-assessment, analysis and action-planning committees”.
He said the Aids pandemic is the ”greatest crisis” that Botswana has faced, with other countries not ”blatantly” listing Aids as the number-one factor contributing to increased numbers of orphans.
Trix Marais, a regional director employed by Child Welfare South Africa and responsible for the Western and Northern Cape, said case loads for social workers have become ”unmanageable”.
”We have to deal with up to 200 cases per social worker, up from an average of about 70 a few years ago.”
The majority of cases are now Aids-related.
Marais said available children’s homes are buckling under the influx of vulnerable children.
Child Welfare will be implementing an Aids programme in all nine provinces that will, among other things, have a ”neighbour-to-neighbour” aspect where people in communities will be trained to help look after Aids orphans. — Sapa