- With an estimated 2.6 million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS over the last decade, Ethiopia faces an uphill battle in its attempts to care for these children.
Five-year-old Tesema Asamnew (not his real name) is one of the children being cared for at the Abebech Gobena Child Care and Development Organization. Abebech Gobena, founder and manager of the organisation, remembers the day Tesema came to the home four years ago.
"This boy was abandoned in the street and found by the police, who brought him to my organisation. He was just one-year-old at the time," Abebech said. "When we receive any orphaned children, they undergo HIV testing, and Tesema was unlucky to have the virus with him."
Abebech's centre, through various partners, cares for thousands of children across Ethiopia, 420 of whom have tested positive for the HI virus. It provides children with basic necessities, including food and shelter, education, skills training, psychosocial rehabilitation and HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness.
Tesema attends school and benefits from all the services Abebech's organisation provides. However, he has not been given life-prolonging antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, as the organisation lacks the funding to provide ARVs to its young clients.
Woldesemayat Tamene, the Addis Ababa HIV project coordinator for the organisation, said the centre concentrated on providing nutritional support to its HIV-positive children.
"The reason we are treating the AIDS orphaned children with nutrition is that we found it difficult to start the drug because once you start to treat the children with the drug, you can't stop it," he said. "We are giving special care and support for those living with the virus. Each of the children living with the virus has a baby sitter who closely follows their health status and care."
The government officially introduced ARVs for children six months ago, but they remain out of reach for most people caring for HIV-positive children in desperately poor Ethiopia, where almost half of the country's 71 million people live on less than one dollar a day.
HOPE Enterprise, another organisation working with children orphaned by AIDS, is also using nutrition to keep HIV-positive children healthy. "The drug has many problems. It requires special health officials and huge money, which we cant afford now," said Mekonnen Mandefro, HIV/AIDS coordinator of Hope.
Mandefro said if the government intended to reduce the number of children orphaned by AIDS, it needed to start by putting more resources towards lowering the country's 4.4 percent HIV prevalence.
"Once we are able to reduce the spread of the virus, we can control the rising of AIDS orphaned children in the country," he said. "They are not getting enough care and treatment because of financial constraints and ignorance."
At the launch of a report on orphans in the capital, Addis Ababa, recently, Alexandro Concicini, a child protection official with the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, noted that the number of orphans in Ethiopia was rising at an alarming rate.
"The overall number of orphans in Ethiopia was estimated to be 4.6 million, or 13 percent of the total number of children in Ethiopia," he said. "This figure is estimated to rise to 14.8 percent by the year 2010. In absolute terms, this is going to be the largest number of orphans in any country in the world."
"Children orphaned by HIV/AIDS suffer from greater social isolation, stigma, discrimination and social and emotional adjustment problems," he added. "They are less likely to be adopted and have more difficulty in securing employment."
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