Accountability to the World’s Children
September 27, 2007 - Statement by Jennifer Delaney, Executive Director of Global Action for Children, in response to "Financial Resources Required to Achieve Universal Access to HIV Prevention, Treatment, Care, and Support," released by UNAIDS on September 26, 2007.
The following may be quoted from. Please contact Janet Hodur, GAC Communications Director, at 202-589-0808 x224 or jhodur@globalactionforchildren.org with any editorial issues or questions.
Societies are judged and have long prided themselves on the way they care for their children. With this as a measure, how will we as a society provide for the nearly 20 million children UNAIDS projects will be orphaned by AIDS in 2010? The agency projects it will cost US$4.4 billion to care for them all - a target set by the Millennium Development Goals and others.
All 19 million of these children are in dire need of support. In many cases, these kids, perhaps just eight or 14 years old, are "heads of household," caring for younger brothers and sisters, and sometimes a sick, surviving parent. These children often carry the burden of putting food on the table, getting medicine, and protecting younger siblings. They live day in, day out with this kind of pressure - in many cases, on top of standing by helplessly as their parents perish. All too often, this leads to desperate measures: a child is forced to trade sex with a predator to survive, or forced out of school due to lack of funds, and must endure brutal conditions as a domestic servant to earn money to care for family members. Many more children are left vulnerable to a whole host of other abuses and traumas.
Having a surviving parent does not always alleviate the burden and mean a child needs less help, either - no matter how much we wish it did. With the AIDS pandemic ravaging large swaths of our world, it sometimes means the child needs more support. to help care for that ailing parent and other siblings.
UNAIDS acknowledges that the resource needs estimates in this new report do not meet all the needs of orphans and vulnerable children. The report reads, "These resource estimates do not fully include certain programmatic areas that are not directly linked to HIV service delivery, but are still pertinent to an effective response to the disease. These include...specific social mitigation interventions for orphans and vulnerable children."
The report calls for the remainder of needs to be met through broader development assistance, but this can be a dangerous path to take. In order for these children to truly be given the chance every child deserves, they need complete support. We as an international community need to ensure the funding is there to give it to them.
As a society, we need to hold ourselves accountable to these 19 million children and the future of the world they hold in their small hands.
