On Monday at a Namibia meeting of African officials considering the plight of AIDS orphans, a UNICEF representative called the international response to the sub-Saharan epidemic "shamefully short" of what is needed.

"Despite expressions of commitment from so many countries, the actual response has been very limited in scale, fragmented, and shamefully short of what is required to thwart this preventable tragedy," said Urban Jonsson, UNICEF's regional director for southern and eastern Africa. "We must amplify our strategies to scale-up actions which touch the lives of children, he told the delegates from 22 countries. "We have to kill the myth of the capacity of the so-called African extended family," he said, noting that extended families have been over-extended for quite some time and are no longer a coping mechanism.

There were 34 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa in 2001, of which 11 million had lost parents to AIDS, Jonsson said. By 2010, those figures are projected to rise to 42 million and 20 million. Of Namibia's 82,000 orphans, 42 percent were orphaned by AIDS. With a population of 1.8 million, Namibia has an adult HIV prevalence rate of 22.5 percent.

Namibian Health and Social Services Minister Libertina Amathila reiterated that the traditional extended family system is being overwhelmed by the problem. "A grandparent can end up sometimes in charge of 12 orphans, when the monthly pension of 250 Namibian dollars [US $26] for people over 60 becomes the whole family's income."

The Namibian government and several agencies and non-governmental organizations are hosting the five-day conference in Windhoek. Conferees will assess which programs for orphans and other vulnerable groups have worked and should be developed and replicated.

Back to other CDC news for November 26, 2002

Previous Updates | Search the CDC archive