*EPF417 07/13/00
Report Predicts World's Orphans will Exceed 40 Million by 2010
(U.S. Agency says AIDS will kill most parents of orphans) (760)
By Charlene Porter
Washington File Staff Correspondent
Durban, South Africa -- The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) presented a report July 13 predicting that 44 million of the world's children will become orphans through the death of one or both parents by the year 2010. AIDS will be the cause of death for 68 percent of the parents of these children.
USAID officials presented the report, "Children on the Brink," at the XIII International AIDS Conference underway in Durban, South Africa. They were joined by Sandra Thurman, director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, who said the census explaining the serious threat to the next generation is powerful evidence for the need to marshal more resources to combat AIDS.
"The need to support children and families affected by AIDS crosses all boundaries, all borders, all the political spectra that we have to deal with when we're trying to marshal the kind of political will and public will that we need to get the resources to effect this epidemic in a positive way," Thurman told a news conference.
The report describes the children as a threatened generation if they have no parents to ensure they grow up with adequate nutrition, education and guidance. Thurman said ominous signs of the consequences of inaction are already apparent in Lusaka, Zambia, where 100,000 orphaned children live on the street, many of them turning to criminal activity merely to survive.
Report co-author John Williamson said, "The potential for social unrest, social instability is pretty significant if you have a very substantial proportion of your population that has been undereducated, malnourished, marginalized .... No one can predict exactly what the consequences would be."
At the same time that the report predicts the social breakdown that could occur if such a large cohort of youngsters is orphaned, it offers five strategies to protect the upcoming generation: strengthen family capacity to cope with the loss of one or both parents; strengthen the community's capacity to help orphans; improve children's capacity to care for themselves; ensure that governments protect the most vulnerable; and create an enabling environment for children and their families.
"The community is the second social safety net," Williamson said. "The family is first, the community is second. People of good will are concerned about the children being made vulnerable in their community, and they respond in really impressive ways."
But community capacity is being strained by the magnitude of the problem. "The problem has been that those kind of community-based responses, the spontaneous ones, have been relatively scattered and limited in relation to the magnitude of the problem," Williamson said.
"Children on the Brink," a census of orphans in 34 countries, calculates that there are a total of 34.7 million orphans this year, with 30.3 million of those to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. Of that current global total, the USAID report finds that 15.6 million orphans have lost their mother, or both their parents, to AIDS.
USAID officials used an African definition of an orphan to define the terms of their study. A child is considered an orphan in Africa, according to the study's co-authors, even while one of his parents may survive. In the West, a child is generally not considered an orphan unless both parents are dead. For that reason, officials acknowledge that their count of the world's orphans is higher than that calculated by other international organizations.
The current report follows an earlier USAID census of orphans conducted in 1997 that was the first of its kind. In the intervening years, more than five million adults have died from HIV/AIDS, "leaving at least that many new orphans," according to an overview that opens "Children on the Brink."
In the year 2000, the report finds the highest percentage of orphaned children in Zambia, where more than 27 percent of children under 15 are orphans. The report finds the greatest aggregate numbers of parentless children in Mozambique, where 1.5 million children are orphans.
Fifteen percent of children in sub-Saharan Africa under age 15 will be orphaned by the year 2010, according to the predictions of the USAID report. In Southern Africa, the world region most severely stricken by the AIDS epidemic, the projections indicate that percentage could climb to 30 percent or higher in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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