Aids orphans need help

2003-05-07 17:11

Nairobi - Africa must help its 11 million Aids orphans or risk them being driven to the margins of society, All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) President Kwesi Dickson warned here on Wednesday.

"These children need education, feeding and nurturing... otherwise the option will be the emergence of a large proportion of our society, who will have developed anti-social instincts because of their hard life," Dickson told the opening session of a three-day AACC conference on HIV/Aids in Africa.

Twenty-nine million of the world's 42 million people living with Aids are in Africa, where the vast majority of the continent's nearly 800 million population survive on less than a dollar a day, according to AACC estimates.

The conference, which has brought together officials from donor organisations, UN agencies and representatives from several religious groups, will discuss ways of combatting the spread of Aids in Africa and how to spend the Global Fund given by the UN to fight Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.

Dickson said households in the world's poorest continent were inreasingly headed by orphans, whose parents have died of Aids or related ailments.

Silent genocide

"Child-headed households were rare in Africa, until the Rwandan genocide of 1994," Dickson said.

"Now another genocide - a silent genocide which happens to be HIV/Aids - has caused child-headed households to be an increasing phenomenon in Africa."

Dickson said the fight against the spread of the HIV virus that causes Aids should be stepped up in the rural areas, where 70% of Africa's population live.

He also urged religious groups to continue their fight against stigmatisation of Aids sufferers, despite of lack of adequate funds, so as to restore their dignity that had partly been damaged by stigma.

"It frustrates awareness campaigns and encourages their discrimination," Dickson pointed out.

Dickson stressed that taking the fight to the African countryside is the most practical way to tackle the scourge among the continent's least informed groups of people.

In most parts of Africa, public-awareness programmes have not reached rural areas, due to poverty and shoddy infrustracture.

Early this year, UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) head James Morris warned that the world had neglected some 11 million African Aids orphans.

- AFX