Posted on 17-6-2003

No future

Decimated by famine and the Aids pandemic, entire communities in southern Africa are facing collapse, writes Judith Melby

Monday June 16, 2003

Last year, humanitarian agencies in the UK called for urgent action to avert a potential famine faced by 14 million people in southern Africa. It was a difficult message to convey. There were no images of skeletal figures reminiscent of Ethiopia in 1984, yet the response from British donors was generous and famine was averted. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands are still reliant on food aid, and after an erratic rainy season, the situation in the region remains precarious.

But famine is not the only concern. Underlying this potential disaster is a new element which will not be defeated by food aid alone. The Aids pandemic affects almost 30 million people in Africa. In the countries of southern Africa, an average of 25% of the adult population is affected and it is changing the nature of famine. It is reducing agricultural productivity, decimating the productive generation and undermining people's ability to recovery from food shortages.

HIV/Aids kills some of the most productive members of society. More teachers die each year in Zambia than graduate from teacher training colleges. The pandemic has also left women, children and the elderly heading houselholds which are acutely vulnerable to food shortages as they have fewer opportunities to earn an income or grow crops.

Impoverished families are forced to bear the costs of ill health and often liquidate household assets to pay for medical expenses and funeral costs. Children leave school to care for their dying parents, or to look for work. In doing so, they lose any access they might have had to HIV/Aids education.

Keeping children, and particularly girls, in school is vital for their future. It is also key in reducing their vulnerability to violence, sexual exploitation and HIV. Yet in their role as main breadwinners, many are forced to turn to alternative work including prostitution, which exposes them to a high risk of HIV infection.

Colin Madundo is HIV positive and very ill. His wife died of an Aids-related illness two years ago. Such situations are not unusual in Zimbabwe, where 2,000 people die each week from Aids. What is surprising is Madundo's willingness to admit he infected his wife. Although one in three Zimbabwean adults are living with HIV, very few are willing to admit it.

Madundo has huge responsibilities and very few resources, as he is too ill to work. In addition to four-year-old twins, named Prince and Princess, he has five other children to raise.

He lives in Manicaland district which, like the rest of Zimbabwe, is suffering from drought. The drought has sparked food shortages, and the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy and President Robert Mugabe's highly controversial land reform policies have made it all but impossible for ordinary people to cope. Occupations of huge maize farms over the past two years have allowed irrigation systems to dry up and once-fertile fields have reverted to barren bush. Cereal production has fallen by two-thirds.

Prince, Princess and four of Madundo's other children receive food aid every day from Christian Care. The organisation, which is funded by Christian Aid, feeds some 10,000 children under the age of five in Manicaland. Its programme started as a supplementary initiative, but many parents admit that it is has become their children's principle source of nutrition. Their bowl porridge is sometimes their only meal of the day.

Farmers like Madundo are used to tough times. He remembers the droughts of 1982 and 1992. But now weakened by HIV, and battered by hyperinflation and a collapsed economy, his ability to cope is fast disappearing.

"Things are much worse now. In 1992 you could buy maize in the stores and your money was worth something. Now there is no maize in the country. Thank goodness the children get something at school," he says.

Madundo suspects Prince and Princess are HIV positive, but he can barely afford to feed them, let alone send them for voluntary testing and counselling, and he is desperately worried about their future.

"When I die, who will look after them?" he asks. "Life is so hard for them already, how will they manage without me?"

Christian Aid is integrating HIV/Aids awareness and education into all its development and emergency work in Africa. In Zimbabwe, for example, feeding sessions provide an ideal opportunity to educate mothers.

The combination of Aids and famine, exacerbated by poor healthcare and education systems, a lack of sanitation and weak economies is making life in southern Africa unsustainable. Entire communities are collapsing, and while the developed world fails to properly address the Aids pandemic, the prospect of a recovery from the combined threats is bleak.

" Judith Melby is Christian Aid's journalist in Africa