12 February 2007
Nairobi — Existing interventions are failing African children affected by HIV/AIDS, leaving them with little access to treatment and limited support, a recent pan-African conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, heard.
The five-day conference, the Second Technical Exchange Networks Forum, was organised by the Hope for African Children Initiative (HACI), and explored ways to ensure the most effective use of resources and best practices in child HIV/AIDS management. HACI, formed in 2000, is a consortium of six international organisations with the aim of combating the impact of the pandemic on African children.
Delegates attending a recent pan-African conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, called for new ideas to deal with the duplication of services and gaps in HIV service delivery.
According to a UNICEF report released in January 2007, only 1 in 10 children needing antiretroviral treatment were receiving it, while those who had lost both parents to AIDS or other causes were generally less likely to attend school than those with one or both parents.
"Cases of children who have no access to material and financial help for lack of information are far too many," said Anne Lindeberg, who represents the Swedish International Development Agency in Zambia. "There also cases of ignorance of their rights and entitlements that result in losing out services to wily NGO [nongovernmental organisation] agents and bogus organisations."
She noted that inadequate resources, poor coordination at policy implementation level and a shortage of skilled human resources in most sub-Saharan African countries had denied orphans and vulnerable children critical services.
Lindeberg attributed the slow response to children's needs to the top-down approaches favoured by most African states when responding to the epidemic, saying these methods contained loopholes that needed to be sealed if children were to access the uninterrupted medical and social services they were entitled to.
"In Zambia, we have attempted to go round this hurdle by training caregivers at the grassroots," she said. "We equip them with knowledge and skills to prevent material and financial support from evaporating into thin air along the supply chain."
George Ariya, a Kenyan delegate, said duplicated and overlapping agendas, combined with reluctance by some HIV/AIDS organisations to collaborate on project implementation, had deprived children of humanitarian and material support in western Kenya, where his Roman Catholic NGO operates.
"Some organisations decline to participate in programmes ... and when they agree to collaborate, it is difficult [for them] to share responsibilities to hasten service delivery," he said. "There are cases where HIV/AIDS programmes have not been implemented because organisations have clashed over the mode of implementation or the budget."
An Ethiopian representative, Tesfaye Haymanot, said proliferating community-based organisations had given rise to "briefcase" NGOs that abused donor funds. Despite breaking the law and failing to account for their spending, he noted that such NGOs continued to mushroom, giving the impression to wider society that all NGOs were suspect.
According to UNAIDS estimates, sub-Saharan Africa had two million children under the age of 15 living with HIV in 2005, while about 12 million children under the age of 17 had lost one or both parents to AIDS.
Children and AIDS: A Stocktaking Report
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
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