Dr. Avnish Jolly, : “Children have been short-changed in the response to AIDS,” according to Prof. Linda Richter, Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa shared with delegates at the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico on 11th August, 2008.
According to UNAIDS estimate figures two million children aged between below 14 were living with HIV in 2007 – an eight-fold increase since 1990. 2007 alone accounted for a three-fold increase in new HIV infections and deaths among children. About 370,000 children became newly infected with HIV last year and 270,000 died. The response to AIDS has bolstered the provision of prevention, treatment and care services, the needs of children continue to be overlooked. Richter’s talk was devoted to the well-being of children affected by HIV and AIDS in the conference’s 23-year history.
Majority of HIV-positive children are infected through Mother-to-Child Transmission (MTCT) and despite recent progress, services aimed at preventing MTCT reach just a third of those women in need in developing countries. Around 10% of children living with HIV receive antiretroviral therapy (ART). Last year, less than 8% of infants in low and developing were tested for HIV within two months of their birth and only one in every 25 babies exposed to HIV receive the vital antibiotic trimoxazole. International Labour Organization estimates that the cost of a small universal old age pension, universal primary education, free primary health care and a child benefit of approximately US $ 0.25 per.
“They are visible in the photo opportunities and headlines, but mostly invisible in the response to HIV,” Richter added during her presentation on subject ‘No Small Issue: Children and Families.’ Prof. Richter also noted that reducing the impact of extreme poverty through social protection efforts was a crucial missing ingredient in services for children affected by HIV / AIDS. “Developing Countries country can afford a social protection for children affected by HIV and extreme poverty,” she advocated.
Prof. Richter stressed that targeting interventions specifically towards orphans or AIDS-affected children is neither helpful nor efficient in hard-hit communities where there is widespread poverty and destitution. In these circumstances, orphans are seldom worse off than other vulnerable children and singling out specific groups of children can result in the stigmatization and abuse of those in need. All children in communities severely affected by HIV require support badly.
Prof. Richter said that children orphaned by AIDS are, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg of HIV-affected children and our primary focus in designing and implementing policies must be the actual needs of all children affected by HIV and AIDS, not whether they meets a funding agencies definition of ‘orphan’.
Prof. Richter shared that in some southern African countries more than 30% of families have an adult member living with HIV or have experienced a recent AIDS-related death. More than 60% of children live below the poverty line in countries already struggling with low incomes.
The support offered to individual children by different organizations in these situations has been critical but has fallen sadly short of meeting their needs. Very few interventions aimed at children have been formulated, resourced or implemented on a scale comparable to the epidemic’s impact on children and their families.
Child-focused responses comprise a number of adhoc projects with limited outreach that are often imperfectly designed and under-funded. In the most severely affected regions, families and communities are left to bear the overwhelming burden of the epidemic, including about 90% of the associated financial costs.
According to Prof. Richter, around 15% of households supporting vulnerable children globally receive any support from community-based or public sector projects.
“Civil Society Organizations and FBOs provide most of the available support but it is very small, localized projects can only take us so far. To have a bigger impact requires larger and more systemic ands strategic responses – responses which support families and address the pervasive poverty in which so many of them live,” Prof. Richter shared.
During her intraction Prof. Richter laid out a new action agenda for the provision of social protection and universal access to some of the poorest families in developing countries.
“Putting needed resources into the hands of affected families should be urgently considered in order to expand the impact of small-scale programmes currently reaching only very small numbers of children,” Richter said.