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AIDS Reversing African Girls' Progress
June 10, 2005
"There are no
days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
AIDS Reversing African Girls' Progress
A New York Times article, "AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls" (June 3, 2005), describes the devasting impact of AIDS on the hopes of Africa's female population...
"...Africa claims the world's highest adolescent birthrate and the world's lowest share of girls enrolled in primary school. But for the last 25 years, the trend has been positive. African girls, like girls elsewhere, were marrying later, and a growing percentage were in school.
"The AIDS empidemic now threatens to take away those hard-won gains. Orphaned and impoverished by the deaths of parents, girls here are being propelled into sex at shockingly early ages to support themselves, their siblings and, too often, their own children....
"With 12 million children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa because of AIDS, suffering abounds among boys as well as girls. But orphaned girls tend to fare worse, relief officials say, because they traditionally hold lower status in African society, are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation, and, for anatomical reasons, are more likely than boys to contract HIV.
"In Zimbabwe, a new UNICEF study has found that orphaned girls are three times more likely to become infected than girls whose parents are alive. In Zambia, orphaned girls are the first to be withdrawn from school. In Zambia's capital, Lusaka, impoverished relatives order some orphaned girls as young as 14 out on the street at night, tellling them they must earn their keep, a recent survey found."
For a fuller story on the impact of AIDS on African young children, see the World Forum presentation, "The Power of Early Childhood as a Healing Force in the AIDS Crisis," by MIchael Kelly at http://www.worldforumfoundation.org/wf/presentations/index.php
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