Yvonne Heselmans, Head of the Development Education Unit

 

Over the past two decades, 20 million people have died of AIDS and 42 million people are infected by the HIV-virus worldwide. Three million of those infected are children. HIV/AIDS also has enormous consequences for children who are not infected themselves. Africa, for example, has 11 million AIDS orphans. In Uganda 12% of the population is orphan. Given the current peak on HIV-infected people, 2010 expects a peak of orphans. The total number of children orphaned by HIV/AIDS worldwide will have doubled to 25 million by then. To protect the rights of children Plan Netherlands is campaigning to pay more international attention on the effects of Aids on children. To tackle the effects of aids it is essential to recognise the medical challenges but also the social-economic challenges of the pandemic.

 

Violation of children's rights

There is a huge concern that the increasing group of vulnerable children and orphans will lack protection progressively over the coming years. If nothing changes in the local, national and international aids policy, the rights of many children, as mentioned in the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child (CRC), are violated on a huge scale due to the aids pandemic. The right to be care for, the right on education and health, the right to be protected from exploitation are some examples of violated rights in the context of aids. Not only in Africa children, but also, in the nearby future, also in Latin America and Asia.

 

Social care systems deteriorate

Families try to foster orphans as much as possible despite their difficult circumstances. Therefore many families are too poor to cater extra foster children. Therefore the orphans are often kept from school to earn some money for the foster family. Also the situation of the own children of the foster parents deprives due to the number of extra children to care for in relation to the growing poverty in the family. However, an increased number of children don't have the opportunity to be fostered by families at all. In the (relatively) best cases they stay together as 'child headed families'. In the worse cases, they loose each other and become streetchildren. They are left vulnerable for all kind of exploitation like child labour, child abuses, prostitution or recruition as child soldiers.

 

While on the one hand the number of orphans and vulnerable children is growing considerable, on the other hand the social care systems for these children are deteriorating. Parents and family members are dying. But also other social or economic systems, which are able to protect children, are collapsing, like schools, health centres, and social workers. They hollow out since a growing number of staffmembers with aids.

 

Hope for African Children Initiative

Until recently aids was exclusively approached as a medical challenge. There was a limited attention for the social economic effects of Aids on children. For a long time, the extreme difficult position of orphans and other vulnerable children (OVC) in society were hardly mentioned within AIDS policies on all levels of society. Based on this concern International NGO's, like Plan, together with African partners have established the Hope for African Children Initiative (HACI). The aim of HACI is to protect the children who are deprived by the aids pandemic. Her approach is purely developed from out of the perspective of children. HACI recognise four phases of intervention:

a. Phase to prevent people from HIV infection and to promote destigmatisation of aids infected people, and their children;
b. Phase to prolong the possibilities to life by giving medical treatment to the infected parents;
c. Phase to support the parents and the children in the transformation from life to death. In this phase parents and children are counselled, or helped in the making of a book of memories. But also the parents are supported in writing their wills, in order to protect their properties for the benefit of the children. They are also supported to register their children before they die.
d. Phase to take care and protect the orphans by giving them education and guaranteeing community support. Plan Netherlands is supporting this HACI initiative. Plan also reinforce the lobby of HACI in the Netherlands and European Union to come up with a integral aids policy on all levels of society, focussing on the effects of aids on children. Policymakers need to address the question of speed and scale of the effects of HIV/AIDS on OVC's and specifically the question what adaptations to the mechanisms of co-operation have to be made.

 

For more information on the effects of aids on children and HACI Plan Netherlands launched the publication 'If parents die….', case study of Uganda. You can order this publication (for free) by sending your details to Dit e-mailadres is beschermd tegen spambots. U heeft Javascript nodig om het te kunnen zien.