Impact on HIV - Building Partnerships - Volume 2 - Nº1 - June 2000 - 01 - Impact on HIV: Building Community-Based Partnerships to Support Orphans and Vulnerable Children

As the growing number of children losing parents to AIDS overwhelms fragile social safety nets, many believe that strengthening community-based efforts is the only hope for building effective, sustainable support systems for orphans and other vulnerable children. . . MaTsepo* likes her work as coordinator of a support group in Soweto, South Africa, because she can help comfort women like herself who are learning to live with HIV. But she still has questions about the virus and how it will affect her own life.. . One question looms larger than all the others. MaTsepo takes a deep breath, then says: "Both of us -- me and my husband -- are HIV-positive, and our youngest one is three years old. When I’m going to die, what about my children? Who is going to look after my children?". . It is a question that haunts many parents. More than 32 million adults -- including about 15 million women -- were living with HIV at the end of 1999, and almost 13 million had already died of AIDS.. . The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimate that by the end of 1999, more than 11 million children younger than 16 had lost a mother or both parents to AIDS. According to the United States Bureau of the Census, more than 7 million of those children live in the 34 countries ...

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