• Adolescents living with HIV face complex psychosocial concerns: require targeted, comprehensive services
• Child mortality falls after mothers receive HIV drugs
• AFRICA: Six challenges to delivering treatment as prevention

Kate is writing to us from the International AIDS Conference in Vienna. Join in the conversation!

Conference Update: The Symposium Family Support First: Working Together to Achieve Universal Support and Access to Treatment

Before the start of the International AIDS Conference a group of over 450 academics, policy makers, researchers, implementing agencies, activists, and community representatives met in Vienna to discuss the importance of families in the HIV response.

The Symposium  Family Support First: Working Together to Achieve Universal Support and Access to Treatment was organised by the Theresa Group and Coalition for Children Affected by HIV and AIDS. This event has taken place every 2 years since the Toronto 2006 International AIDS conference in response to the lack of sessions at the IAC focussed on children and their families. A group of concerned individuals who had attended the Bangkok  conference in 2004 and witnessed the decorative use of young children at the opening ceremony, but a total absence of children’s issues in the main conference , decided something needed to change.

The symposium event has grown over the last 6 years to bring together more and more of the key people in the sector, discussing the care, support and protection of children affected by HIV and AIDS. This year the event welcomed the likes of Michel Sidibe UNAIDS, Jimmy Kolker UNICEF, messages from Gracha Machel and a closing speech from Elizabeth Mataka, Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa. Despite this growing international profile for the event you might be surprised to hear that over the 6 years there has still been no significant increase in the inclusion of the issues of children and families into the main conference.

 Analysis done by CCABA over the last 6 years calculated that you were 6x more likely to have an abstract accepted for the conference if you did not use the word’ children’ and 11x more likely to be accepted  if you used the word ‘Bill’ as in Clinton or Gates. Children and their families are critical to the HIV and AIDS response. We cannot eliminate pediatric AIDS without families, we cannot achieve universal access without a focus on families, when is the world going to wake up to this reality and give children and families their rightful place on the agenda?

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• SOUTH AFRICA: No funds for poor and sick


• VIENNA: International Organizations Agree to Take Concerted Action to End Pediatric HIV/AIDS

Kendra is emailing us updates from the International AIDS Conference in Vienna. Join in the conversation!

Entry #2:  Grandparents – correcting a common misconception

A serious misconception on grandparent headed households is that they are all elderly or consist of frail caregivers unable to provide adequate support for the children under their care.  Recent evidence indicated that some grandparents are young (60 or less) and quite able and even those who are not young are finding ways through social networks to provide for the children under their care. The existence of social networks and the ability to engage reciprocally in these networks are key to sustaining support for these households.

 

Kendra is emailing us updates from the International AIDS Conference in Vienna. Join in the conversation! 

Entry #1: Children as carers

In the recent past, research conducted on children affected by HIV/AIDS indicated that the phenomenon of child headed households was not as prevalent as we thought. However, recent evidence indicates that we were looking at the issue in the wrong way. It is not who is heading the household. Rather, it is who is assuming caregiving responsibilities within that household.

 

More and more the burden of care is shifting to children even in instances where there is an older caregiver in the household. However, that caregiver may be ill or too frail to adequately handle all the caregiving tasks. As a result, children are taking more responsibility for providing for the families (engaging in economic activity) and providing care for other members of the households including young children and older grandparents.  Child carers include a wide range of children beyond those who are heading households. It also includes children who are living with parents who have a chronic and debilitating illness; those living with and caring for increasingly frail grandparents, who may have formerly been caring for their adult child; and those heading households and caring for younger siblings.  The changing caregiving dynamics requires a paradigm shift from thinking only of child headed households as the target group for intervention. Rather, we should be looking more at the age and capacity (including a look at disability) of caregivers in these households.

Children and HIV: Family Support First - Working Together to Achieve Universal Support and Access to Treatment is an international symposium that will present the latest evidence and share the latest models on family-centered care and services for children affected by HIV and AIDS. The underlying theme for the symposium is based on the findings of The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and AIDS which demonstrated how central and under-supported families are in their care of children affected by HIV and AIDS.

The two-day symposium, jointly hosted by The Teresa Group, the Coalition on Children Affected by AIDS (CCABA), and World Vision Austria, will be held on July 16th & 17th 2010 at the Austria Center in Vienna. The symposium will bring together close to 600 service providers, donors, researchers, advocates and policy leaders working within affected communities on national, regional and global platforms. It will promote opportunities for stronger linkages between program design and implementation, policy, research, and advocacy efforts.

This think-tank and networking opportunity is for anyone working on issues related to children and HIV/AIDS and is concerned about how to improve local, national and international responses.