'Number of Aids orphans rising'

2006-10-19 20:25

Dakar - More than 18 million children in Africa will be orphaned by Aids by the end of the decade if no efforts are made to fight the pandemic among the continent's young population, said the United Nations.

Millions of children already orphaned or infected by the disease were being overlooked as governments and donors drew up strategies to fight HIV/Aids.

This oversight was hobbling the development of some of the world's poorest countries, it said.

"The number of orphans will continue to rise for at least the next decade and progress in education, health and development will remain a distant dream," said Esther Guluma, head of UN children's fund (Unicef) in West and Central Africa.

Even if the number of new HIV/Aids infections among adults were to peak today, the number of orphaned children would continue to rise because it took around a decade from the time of infection for a person to die, said Guluma.

Orphans socially marginalized

This lag effect meant the impact of Aids would increase "exponentially" in coming years, undermining other development efforts as it left orphans socially marginalized and more likely to face health problems and disruption to their schooling.

"As the disease evolves and kills, it also fuels poverty and despair among children and adolescents and stretches family and community resources to their limits," Unicef said in a report handed out after a three-day Aids conference this week in Dakar.

"Because of the ignorance and denial that cloak the disease, children whose parents have died from Aids are often stigmatised and singled out for abuse in the places where they seek support and care," it said.

More than half of the 350 million people living in West and Central Africa are 18 years old or younger, according to UN figures, many of them sexually active from an early age.

Yet adolescent promiscuity is a taboo subject in the region's often conservative societies, leaving many young people ill-informed about how Aids is transmitted.

Access to drugs for those infected, particularly important to prevent pregnant women from passing the disease to their children, was also a major problem in the region, where 680 000 children aged up to 14 were living with Aids in 2005.

Lobbying helps bring lower drug prices

Unicef estimates only around one percent of pregnant women and children infected with HIV receive antiretroviral drugs in West and Central Africa, far from a 2010 target of 80%.

But broader progress is being made.

Lobbying was helping to bring down the price of drugs and encourage governments to allocate more of their resources to help children and pregnant women, said Eric Mercier, Unicef's West and Central Africa advisor on HIV/Aids.

Ivory Coast had set up its first voluntary testing and counselling centre, which paid school fees for the children of infected parents, while 2 000 orphans in Central African Republic had received healthcare and counselling.

"To begin with, people just thought about adults and the effect on the economy," said Abdou Latif Gueye, chairperson of Senegalese charity Jamra, which provides food and schooling for street children including those affected by HIV/Aids.

"Children were forgotten. There was no engagement. But things are changing," he said as a gaggle of young boys and girls in the charity's green smocks chattered away behind him.

- Reuters