Aids: 18m kids may lose parents

2006-10-11 15:27

Celean Jacobson

Johannesburg - The United Nations estimates that by 2010, 18 million African children will have lost a parent to Aids. Already there were more than 43 million orphans on the world's poorest continent.

Most of those millions who have lost parents to Aids or other causes were cared for by relatives, orphanages or find themselves living on the streets.

Reports that United States popstar Madonna wanted to adopt a Malawian child had focused attention on foreign adoptions - and raised questions about whether it's in an African child's best interest to be spirited away to the wealthy West.

Pam Wilson of the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society asked: "Are celebrities doing it for the right reasons and not to make a statement?"

Angelina Jolie adopts Ethiopian child

The adoption of children from poorer nations - Cambodia, Ethiopia, Romania - by rich foreigners had been happening for decades. Angelina Jolie first adopted Maddox from Cambodia and then Zahara from Ethiopia.

Mia Farrow, now the mother of 14, began adopting children from poor countries in 1973 with an orphan from the Vietnam War.

Wilson said there would always be a "demand" for children from developing countries.

She said: "There is a shortage of healthy babies in the First World, particularly now when there is no longer such a stigma to being a single parent and there are few babies in the system."

Jackie Schoeman, executive director of Cotlands, a South African organisation that cared for children affected by HIV, said that international adoptions were not "an easy option,".

In Africa, orphans usually were absorbed into extended families, but Aids had affected many of the people who might have traditionally provided support.

Protecting kids, preventing trafficking

Schoeman said: "For us, first prize is to place the kids locally or even regionally. If the only other option is for them to be in a long-term institutional then we would consider international adoption."

A 1993 Hague Convention governed inter-country adoptions to protect children and prevent trafficking. Not many countries had the agreements the conventions required to allow such adoptions.

South Africa, for example, was a signatory to the convention, but did not have an agreement with the US, United Kingdom or Australia.

SA children could only be adopted by parents from a few European countries such as Finland, Belgium and Botswana. Immigrations laws of certain countries also made it difficult to adopt HIV-positive children.

Malawi signed the Hague agreement, but current legislation did not allow for inter-country adoptions. This would make it illegal for Madonna to take home a child from Malawi, although there were rumors that restrictions were to be waived for her.

Numbers of adoptions for Malawi were not available. South African government statistics showed a decline with 1 500 national or local adoptions in the last year and only 155 inter-country adoptions.

- AP