Charities Give Hope to Africa's Poor
May 20, 2004 -- Last year, UNICEF released a report documenting for the first time the life circumstances of the children in Africa who have been orphaned by AIDS.
These children are in desperate need of every basic supply that is taken as a given in most industrialized countries. They have no food, medical care, clothes, are often left homeless. Organizations like UNICEF and Save the Children have set up charities to help alleviate the suffering.
They raise money for school fees, schoolbooks and supplies, school lunches and health care. Funding is also needed to provide counseling for children who have lost parents to AIDS.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has already orphaned a generation of children, and now seems set to orphan generations more. Today, more than 11 million children under the age of 15 living in sub-Saharan African have been robbed of one or both parents by HIV/AIDS, UNICEF said.
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Seven years from now, that number is expected to have doubled. At that point, anywhere from 15 percent to 25 percent of the children in a dozen sub-Saharan African countries will be orphans — the vast majority of them parentless because of the deadly epidemic that has ravaged so much of the continent's population.
The Key to Solving the Crisis
More than 30 million people are now infected with the disease. The centerpiece of UNICEF's strategy is education. Most African countries charge school fees averaging about $250 a year, which is sometimes that is the per capita income of the average African family.
And while those fees are high for many families in Africa, they almost certainly bar children who are orphaned and alone and have no support system. A few countries, like Kenya, have abolished these fees and the school attendance rates have skyrocketed.
Education gives orphans perhaps their only opportunity to escape the conditions of desperate poverty. Because of the huge stigma surrounding AIDS, schools are the most effective means of teaching children about how to prevent transmission of the disease.
Tragically, since many of these children lose their parents at such an early age, school is also the only place they can learn basic skills like farming to survive. The United Nations is currently sponsoring school gardening projects to teach young children how to be farmers.
A Reason for Hope
UNICEF, working with many major pharmaceutical companies, is also working to keep parents — particularly mothers — alive through wonder drugs that not only help the remission of HIV, but also prevent the transmission of the virus from mother to child.
A single dose administered before a woman goes into labor can decrease the possibility of transmission by more than 50 percent. But only 5 percent of these women get access to the drugs. UNICEF is seeking help from governments, drug companies and private citizens to help support its efforts to get these drugs to the millions of people who are slowly dying from this disease.
The title of the UNICEF report is "Africa's Orphaned Generations." It presents a strategy for ensuring that all Africa's orphaned children have a safe, healthy and well-educated childhood.
It has also established ways that people can learn how to help alleviate the suffering of these children and help them build a foundation for a productive and happy adult life — encouraging hope in the face of an epic disaster.
For more information, visit http://www.unicefusa.org/.