AIDS and Education in Africa

"Every round thing is not a walnut." - Persian Proverb

AIDS and Education in Africa

"AIDS Infects Education Systems in Africa," is the title of a feature story in Education Week (March 16, 2005).  The article describes how the AIDS crisis is impacting education systems in many African nations.  Some excerpts:

"...AIDS is destroying families, which undergird the education system.  Families and the mainstay of schooling in any country, but in African nations, the family is often the only social safety net that can keep children in school.  Now even that net is serioulsy frayed by the AIDS-related illnesses and deaths of men and women in their most productive working years...

"Where rates of HIV infection are high, as they are in much of southern and eastern Africa, experts warn, the effects on social stability and education are so great that young people are being robbed of hope, and national development is being stunted.

"And in a final merciless twist, declines in education reduce the chances of arresting the pandemic since schools may be the best way to reach uninfected young people with information, skills, and attitudes that ultimately protect them.

"Of the estimated 39 million people wordwide living with the human immunodefieciency virus, for which there is no vaccine and no cure, some 70 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa....Millions of Africans have died of the disease in the past 20 years.  The bereft include 11 million sub-Saharan children who have lost one or both parents to the disease, making the total number of orphans in the region more than 34 million."

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