IN A SMALL village in Nairobi, 15-year-old Kamene giggles as she throws a battered ball to her friend.
At first glance, Kamene appears like any other girl her age – she is happy, enjoys playing with her friends and she has a stack full of dreams. She hopes to become a doctor when she is older.
But behind Kamene’s rosy exterior lies a sad tale. When she was very young she was left in the care of her extended family after her mother passed away from Aids. Despite Kamene being very ill for two years, no one from her family sought medical help. She later discovered that she, too, was HIV positive.
Kamene is one of more than 16 million children under 18 who have been orphaned by Aids.
She is also among an estimated 2.5 million children living with the virus.
In the past year alone, around 430,000 children under-15 were newly infected with HIV. Around 90% of these children will have contracted HIV from their mothers.
“Some children initially struggle with feelings of blame towards their parents while also knowing they could be orphaned if their parents are not able to get the drugs they need to keep them alive longer,” explains Save the Children’s HIV advisor Alice Fay.
"They also have to live with the stigma of having a sexually transmitted infection, despite the fact that they may never have had sex.”
Many orphaned children are sent to live with relatives, however they receive very little care and support, particularly if they are HIV positive because of the widespread stigma associated with it.
Luckily, Kamene’s life began to improve when one of her aunts took her to the social and medical centre at the SOS Children’s Village in Nairobi. She was then placed into a home in the village with a new family and she receives free medical care.
An orphan is defined by the United Nations as a child who has lost one or both of their parents, but many children are orphaned because their parents have HIV or AIDS and can no longer take care of them.
Aids orphans face immense emotional and psychological distress.  Long before children are orphaned, they have suffered from the emotional strain of watching and caring for parents who are living with HIV. After becoming orphaned they suffer further from the trauma of the death of one or both of their parents and they quickly have to adjust to a new situation.
“They may be forced to live on the streets or to work in order to support themselves and their siblings,” explains Nico Dauterive of FXB International, a charity aimed at supporting children and families affected by poverty and Aids. “As a result, many children are unable to attend school and have trouble accessing healthcare and other services.  Furthermore, those children who are able to attend school often have trouble concentrating on their work due to the emotional, physical, and psychological impact of their situation.”
Scouring a dusty dirt track in Niger, 18-year-old Ahmadou is collecting iron fragments in the hope he can earn enough money to provide food and shelter for his younger siblings. He has lost both his mother and father to Aids.
Prior to receiving help from SOS Children, Ahmadou had to put his education on hold. Now he has enrolled on a welding course and soon hopes to start up his own business.
 “Once I start working, the money I will make will help me support my small brothers and sisters,” he says. “I will be able to pay for their schooling, for their food and for their clothes.”
But, unfortunately, Ahmadou’s story of having to grow up quickly and be head of the household is not unique in Africa.
 “This level of responsibility often means that a child’s education must be cut short in order to bring in an income to have some sort of financial security,” says Rachael King, information officer at HIV and Aids charity Avert.
So are national governments finally waking up to the severity of the problem of AIDS orphans and the challenges they face?
Angela Larkan, founder and executive director of Thanda, an Aids orphans charity in South Africa, fears not. “People need to wake up and realise that one fifth of South African children are already orphaned and it is only going to get much worse,” she warns. “If you have such a large portion of your population growing up without proper guidance and support, with anger and grief issues, then you are looking at a very scary picture in the future.”
The response from national governments is patchy. King argues that for some countries, like Nigeria, the problem seems too impossible to tackle. However, she says other countries, such as Malawi, have made significant efforts but “sadly the lack of human and financial resources continues to hold back their response to support HIV and Aids orphans”.
So what should governments and NGOs be doing to stem the crisis?
Andrew Cates, chief executive of SOS Children, says the massive scale of the problem means it can only be tackled if governments and NGOs make “major interventions”, to ensure a child actually lives with a relative and “goes to school rather than forages on a waste dump”.
According to a report by the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/Aids, roughly 95 per cent of all children directly affected by HIV and AIDS, including orphans, continue to live with their extended families.
But Dauterive says it is becoming increasingly difficult for these families who are already living in extreme poverty to afford the financial burden of taking in additional children.
“We thus believe the best solution for helping these children is to strengthen the social and economic capacities of their families and communities.”
But Myles Wickstead, former head of secretariat to the Commission for Africa, is optimistic about the future, providing access to antiretroviral treatments is improved.
 “Over time, Aids orphans will become a diminishing problem,” he insists.

For further information, visit:

FXB International

SOS Children's Villages

Thanda

Thousands of people from all over the UK are expected to march through central London this Saturday (26 March) to protest against the spending cuts.

As well as campaign against the cuts to public services, there will be marches for students to get vocal about tuition fees and plans to target tax dodgers on Oxford Street.

I met some of the anti-cuts campaigners at an event called 6 Billion Ways the other day who expressed they are going to fight tooth and nail against the public sector spending squeeze. Plans are under way to use a diversity of tactics, including direct action, popular education and the use of social media.

But is their campaigning all going to be in vain? One of the discussions at the event focused on understanding the ‘unprecedented’ cuts and set out to ‘unpick the facts from the rhetoric’. It was meant to lead to a discussion about the alternatives to the austerity agenda. It is true: the public sector spending cuts are harsh. While the facts are there that some cuts are necessary as there simply isn’t enough cash to foot the magnitude of the current public services bill, the government does appear to be making some quick decisions about where those cuts should come, which will no doubt have some very severe and worrying consequences.

Towns like Barnsley, where around 60 per cent of the jobs are in the public sector, will be particularly badly affected by the cuts. There is an urgent need to think about the knock-on effect of the loss of public sector jobs on local towns and their communities. Delegates at the event agreed that there was a need for a new economic model. Hugh Lanning of the Public and Commercial Services Union said we should be promoting growth not cutting jobs. While it may be plausible to say that a new economic model is needed and that there are alternatives to the cuts, what became apparent was that ideas as to what the alternatives could be were not forthcoming. It is great to see reinvigorated local campaigning across the country as part of a truly democratic society. Nevertheless, if the march on Saturday is to be effective, it will need more than just strong voices and a huge turnout; rather a meaty argument as to what else could be done to pull us out of this relentless economic crisis. To find out more about the march, visit www.unison.org.uk/26march

The Welfare Reform Bill, published this week, represents the most radical reform of the welfare state in decades.

After facing pressure from campaign groups and senior Liberal Democrat MPs, work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has made some significant concessions for the long-term unemployed, disabled people in residential homes and carers.

At the heart of the bill is the introduction of a universal credit with the aim of making it worthwhile to work and help break the benefits trap which has kept millions of people in a misery of welfare dependency and intergenerational cycles of worklessness.

The biggest backtrack that the minister made was with his decision to scrap the plan to cut housing benefit by 10 per cent for those who have been out of work for more than one year.

The Department for Work and Pensions state that the changes will see 2.7 million households better off and that it will pull nearly one million people, including 350,000 children, out of poverty.

Mr Duncan Smith said:"Our reforms will end the absurdity of a system where people too often get rewarded for doing the wrong thing, and those who strive to do the best by their families get penalised. "The publication of the Welfare Reform Bill will put work, rather than hand-outs, at the heart of the welfare system.”

The bill also makes provision for those who are genuinely unable to work and provide a fair deal for the taxpayer.

While homelessness charity Shelter welcomed the government’s u-turn on cutting housing benefit after 12 months for those unable to find jobs, it remains concerned that the other proposals to cut housing benefit will do little to support the government’s aim to get people back into work.

Shelter chief executive Campbell Robb said that in fact the plans to remove the link between housing benefit and the housing costs people pay could push those seeking work out of their homes and actually lead to greater homelessness. “In the current economic climate when further job losses are predicted over the coming months, now is the very worst time to make it more difficult for people to find and keep employment and to take away the housing safety net that helps those who do lose their jobs to stay in their homes.”