Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Daily Mail & Guardian - Johannesburg, South Africa. February 17 2000
David Brough
"Our fear is for the future. Even if the infection rate drops now, you will have a backlog of infected population," Gary Howe, director of the Africa division of the United Nations' International Fund for Agricultural Development, told Reuters.
"The situation will probably get worse as the mortality rate works through the system," he added, speaking on the sidelines of IFAD's governing council meeting in Rome, its headquarters.
He estimated that Africa had 10-11 million Aids orphans, including one million in Uganda, one of the worst-it countries, where IFAD was financing projects to help Aids orphans.
"If we're not making inroads on treatment, then we must do what we can to help survivors," Howe said. "We are losing lots of heads of families. This is putting an additional burden on women and older people.
"We are finding extraordinary impoverishment facing whole generations of children who are more malnourished and have less access to health services (than those not affected by Aids)."
Some 33,6 million people have the HIV/Aids virus around the world, 70 percent of them in Africa, where countries are being robbed of the most productive members of their population.
About 13 million of the 16 million people who have died of Aids are in Africa.
IFAD is involved in loaning small sums to people, many of them women, in rural areas to enable them to generate income to support families devastated by the Aids epidemic.
"The future of Aids orphans depends on the well-being of their families," Howe said.
IFAD had sponsored loans enabling people to engage in small trading, open local clinics and rear livestock.
"Women are taking the lead," Howe said.
He estimated IFAD had reached about 10 000 households in Africa as it sought to ease the poverty of Aids orphans by improving their nutrition and access to health services and education.
"This is having an impact throughout the orphan economy." Eastern and southern Africa have been particularly hard hit by Aids, with 50 percent of the world's HIV positive cases but less than five percent of the global population.
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