Business Day: 32% of SA children to lose a parent to AIDS by 2015
The number of orphans and child-headed households are on the increase in South Africa, the South African Institute of Race Relations reports.
According to statistics in its latest South Africa Survey, by 2015 32% of all children in the country would have lost one or both parents due to HIV/Aids.
"As HIV/Aids continues to affect the life-spans of parents, more and more children are going to be orphaned," the SAIRR’s Gail Eddy said.
In 2007, the SAIRR noted that some 2,500,000 children in South Africa had lost one or both parents, with more than half of all of these deaths a result of HIV/Aids.
Between 2002 and 2007, the number children who had lost both their parents doubled from 352,000 to 701,000.
KwaZulu-Natal, the province with the highest HIV/Aids infection rate, also had the highest number of orphans in 2007 at 229,000, the survey found.
The number of child-headed households had also risen as a result of the HIV/Aids pandemic.
According to the survey, between 2002 and 2007 the number of children living in child-headed households rose by 25% to 148,000 from 118,000.
Eddy said there were limited safety nets for orphaned children.
"The department of social development has a budget which is geared towards the delivery of social grants, such as child support grants.
"However, vulnerable children need additional support that is not necessarily monetary in nature as these children have also lost their primary care-giver." She said that South Africa had a shortage of social workers responsible for identifying vulnerable children.
