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MEDIA CENTER To Help AIDS Orphans, Prolong Life of Parents, Population Council Researcher Tells U.S. House International Relations Committee NEW YORK (30 April 2002) — What can be done to help children affected by HIV/AIDS? According to a Population Council researcher who presented findings to a congressional committee last week, an important approach is to work with parents before their children are orphaned. Programs that prolong the lives of parents and help prepare for their children’s future can help the entire community by elevating the well-being of vulnerable children, said Laelia Zoe Gilborn, M.P.H., a program associate of the Council’s Horizons AIDS Prevention and Care program. Gilborn appeared before the U.S. House International Relations Committee on 17 April to testify on orphans and vulnerable children in Africa. Gilborn and her colleagues from Makerere University and PLAN International in Uganda designed a research project to determine whether enhanced services that begin when parents are still alive are more effective in improving the long-term well-being of children than those that respond only after parents die. The project is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The primary enhancement within the intervention is a “succession planning” component to help HIV-positive parents plan for their children’s future. This includes assistance in choosing a guardian and in acclimating children to the new guardian, will-writing workshops, legal counseling to avoid “property grabbing,” and income-generating programs for both parents and guardians. This approach was pioneered by the National Association of Women Living with AIDS (NACWOLA) of Uganda. More than 1.7 million Ugandan children have been orphaned by the epidemic; throughout sub-Saharan Africa, that number soars to 13.2 million. In the year 2000, the Uganda AIDS Commission surveyed sources of outside assistance for orphans and vulnerable children and found that only 5 percent of AIDS-affected children receive support from programs. “A wide body of literature tells us that children affected by AIDS are vulnerable in almost all aspects of their lives,” Gilborn noted. “AIDS-affected children often have lower school enrollment rates and nutritional status in comparison to their peers. They have less access to basic health care. They suffer from poverty and emotional distress and are vulnerable to various forms of exploitation.” Gilborn identified the following priorities for community interventions that target AIDS-affected children:
Gilborn concluded her testimony with a word of caution about programs that go out of their way to target and identify AIDS-affected children exclusively. “It is surprisingly difficult to determine which children are affected by AIDS when so few people know or reveal their HIV status,” she said. “Community programs can spend valuable resources on elaborate systems of identifying AIDS-affected children, only to further label them and to leave behind other vulnerable children. Programs that elevate the well-being of all vulnerable children can avoid these pitfalls and help the entire community.” The full testimony is available at http://www.popcouncil.org/pdfs/gilborntestimony.pdf Horizons is a USAID-funded global operations research project concerned with HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Horizons works in collaboration with five partner organizations: International Center for Research on Women, Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Tulane University.
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