Inter Press Service - June 25, 2001
Jim Lobe

Millions more Kenyan children affected by the epidemic in other ways also are falling through the tattered mesh of the government's social safety net as they are forced to drop out of school and seek often-dangerous work on the streets in order to care for ill parents. Girls are especially hard hit.

Not only do these children face the psychological trauma of watching their parents die, but, given the prevailing ignorance in Kenya about the ways the virus is transmitted, they also face social isolation and serious difficulties in inheriting land and property, according to the report, which was released to coincide with week's UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV-AIDS in New York.

"If their parents had died in any other way, these children would have been at the top of the agenda" for state and social protection, said Joanne Csete of HRW's Children's Rights Division and the report's author. " But because the parents died of AIDS, with all of the stigma that implies, they're at the bottom."

The 36-page report, based on extensive interviews with affected children and their guardians as well as government officials and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), says the plight of AIDS orphans in Kenya is relatively typical of much of the rest of sub- Saharan Africa, particularly the southern and eastern parts of the region which have been hardest hit by the epidemic. With an estimated 2.1 million people - or 14 percent of the country's sexually active adult population - infected with HIV, Kenya ranks ninth on the list of most-affected countries, substantially higher than Nigeria which has about a five percent rate, but less than half of Botswana's 35.8 percent, the world's highest.

In the past two years, the government of President Daniel arap Moi has taken a more aggressive stance in the fight against HIV-AIDS by, for example, adopting measures to sharply cut the costs of imported condoms and anti-AIDS drugs. But resources remain woefully inadequate to deal with the special problems that AIDS orphans and other AIDS-affected children face, the report said.

While funding for the government's Department of Children's Services has increased substantially in recent years, it still receives less than one percent of the national budget and has only 150 children's officers deployed nationwide.

AIDS is distinctive among lethal epidemics in that most of the lives it takes are those of relatively young adults between 20 and 40 years old. In Africa, where almost 80 percent of the 22 million AIDS deaths have occurred worldwide, the vast majority of victims are parents.

The US Census Bureau estimates there are currently 13 million AIDS orphans in Africa; that is, children who have lost at least one parent to the epidemic. It estimates that by 2010, there will be 28 million AIDS orphans and that more than 30 percent of all children under age 15 in five countries of eastern and southern Africa will be orphaned.

Moreover, in heavily affected countries like Kenya, for each child who has lost a parent to AIDS, there are one or two children of school age who either care for an ill parent or act as breadwinners for the household, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). And children who do not lose a parent are nonetheless affected when orphans are brought into their homes or when they themselves become infected with the virus.

The result constitutes a burden that completely overwhelms families and puts unprecedented pressure on extended families and local communities, which have long acted as the traditional social safety net for orphaned children. These, too, are now "unraveling under the strain of AIDS," according to an Ethiopian researcher quoted by HRW the report.

"If families are not there to help these children, then the state has the responsibility to provide protection," Csete said.

AIDS-affected children across Africa are susceptible to a whole gamut of threats, from contracting HIV-AIDS themselves, in part because they lack access to clear information about HIV transmission and safe sex, to being forced out of school and onto the streets to support their families and themselves.

Girls are especially at risk. They not only are "more readily pulled out of school when someone in the household is ill with AIDS," according to the report, but their rate of HIV infection in Kenya, for example, is about six times higher than that of boys of comparable age in heavily affected regions.

Studies suggest that the higher infection rate may be due in major part to their catching the virus at an early age from older men, in many cases as a result of sex in which they engage to survive economically or through coercion.

A recent report by Save the Children - Sweden, based on extensive interviews with female sex workers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia found that for the most part, "an unprotected girl working on the streets will sooner or later end up working as a prostitute." Several girls interviewed by HRW backed up that conclusion, saying that prostitution was the only way they could make a living.

Alternatives for girls include domestic work but often turn out to be equally hazardous, according to the report. Of 18 HIV-infected girls between the ages of nine and 15 who were interviewed in one report, 15 said their employer or someone in his family or circle of friends coerced them into their first sexual experience.

The inheritance rights of AIDS widows and orphans also tend to be ignored. Widows are often suspected of being infected with HIV and are effectively disinherited by the deceased husband's family, while children have no legal standing to bring cases, except through public trustees or guardians who may not even know their rights, according to the report. (END/IPS/AF/HE/HD/jl/aa/01)
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