This framework and resource guide is intended to help people involved in programs assisting orphans and vulnerable children conduct a situation analysis. It is hoped that this guide will bring about a better understanding ofthe essential elements and outcomes of a situation analysis in order to promote realistic, effective, and feasible interventions to protect and improve the well-being of the children and families who bear the greatest impact of the AIDS epidemic. The guide serves as a tool for collecting and synthesizing in-country and sub-national information. Examples of situation analyses and related research are provided throughout the document to draw upon the variety of approaches, and their components, that communities and institutions have undertaken to assess their particular situation. We hope that these will be used as applicable lessons from actual experience.
Community responses for children affected by AIDS: Challenges for the future! RIATT-ESA satellite – ICASA 2011
The RIATT-ESA held a very successful satellite session at ICASA 2011. Focusing on Strengthening families, Increasing effectiveness of resources, and Child participation, The key note address was presented by Dr. Chewe Luo, and looked at future challenges in the community response for children affected by AIDS.
Dr. Luo is a Paediatrician and Tropical Child Health specialist from Zambia, currently working as Technical team leader for Country programme scale-up and Senior programme Advisor for HIV at UNICEF, New York. She has over 15 years of experience in HIV/AIDS and child health as a clinician and researcher at the University Teaching Hospital in Zambia; as a clinician in the UK, and working with UNICEF at country, regional and headquarter levels. She has a Masters of Medicine in Paediatrics from the University of Zambia and a Masters in tropical Paediatrics and a PhD from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK
Children and AIDS: Fourth stocktaking report, 2009
Children and AIDS: Fourth stocktaking report, 2009.pdf
Years ago, when the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on children was just becoming apparent, there was no way to imagine an AIDS-free generation in the foreseeable future.
In 2005, the epidemic’s consequences prompted UNICEF, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and other partners to launch Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS, a global campaign to focus attention and resources on mitigating the worst effects of HIV and AIDS on children and young people.
Four years into this effort, many lives have been saved or improved because national governments, non-governmental organizations, local communities and international organizations have been examining the evidence and responding.the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV is a global objective.
Combination prevention – integrating behavioural, structural/ social and biomedical approaches – can help to reduce HIV prevalence among young people. AIDS-sensitive, rather than AIDS-exclusive, interventions are being embraced in many places to benefit children affected by AIDS
Children and AIDS: Fifth stocktaking report, 2010
Children and AIDS: Fifth stocktaking report, 2010.pdf
For nearly three decades, HIV and AIDS have been devastating individuals and families with the tragedy of untimely death and medical, financial and social burdens. Although children’s concerns have always been present within the great spectrum of need associated with HIV, they have to some extent been overshadowed by the very scale of the epidemic in the adult population. Thanks to improved evidence and accelerated action, however, the story of how the AIDS epidemic is affecting children is being rewritten.
No longer a sidebar crowded out by the broader compelling narrative of HIV and AIDS, children are now central to strategies and actions to avert and address the consequences of the epidemic. It is estimated that more than 1,000 babies continue to be born with HIV every day, many of them destined to die before age two if they do not receive medication. Mothers are still dying. Adolescents are still becoming infected with HIV because they have neither the knowledge nor the access to services to protect themselves, and those infected at birth are struggling to reconcile their emerging adulthood with their HIV-positive status.
But advocacy and investment on behalf of children have had an impact, and the goal of virtual elimination of mother-tochild transmission by 2015 appears within reach. In 2005, for example, only 15 per cent of HIV-positive pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries received antiretrovirals for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV; in 2009, 53 per cent of women in need received antiretrovirals for PMTCT.
In 2005, only 75,000 children under 15 in need received antiretroviral treatment. Today, that figure is approximately 356,400, around 28 per cent of those in need.
In 2005, 5.2 million young people aged 15–24 were living with HIV; today, an estimated 5.0 million are.4 Before 2005 in many sub-Saharan African countries, children who had lost both parents to AIDS were much less likely to be in school than children whose parents were alive; today, in most places they are almost
equally likely to be in school.