Sunday Times, South Africa - July 9, 2000
Ranjeni Munusamy
As the international AIDS community gathered in the city for a week-long conference, organisations warned that abandoned and orphaned children would have a major impact on health and safety in the city.
The University of Natal's Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division estimates that, by 2010, KwaZuluNatal, the province with the fastest rate of HIV infection, will have about 500 000 AIDS orphans.
The co-ordinator of the Durban Street Children Forum, Julia Zingu, said about 100 children were abandoned on the city's streets every month. The situation was already "unmanageable". Shelters and homes were "bursting at the seams".
Most of the children came from around Durban while others spent days walking from remote rural areas to look for work in the city.
"None of the city's urban renewal projects are going to work if thousands of children are living on the streets.
"It will impact negatively on tourism, crime and the health and welfare of the city," said Zingu. Her organisation had been unable to get money from the government's poverty alleviation fund, the Reconstruction and Development Programme or the departments of health and education.
"The only funding we get is from the Department of Welfare and they give us R4.50 a child a day. If the children are at Westville Prison, they get R75 a day, " said Zingu.
"We treat all the children who come in as HIV-positive. We don't have the funds to test them, but all of them are sexually active - either peer on peer or adult on children.
"The transmission rate among them is very high."
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