Campaign overview

Why children and AIDS?

AIDS is threatening children as never before. In 2007, it was estimated that 2.1 million children under age 15 were living with HIV. As of 2005, more than 15 million children under 18 have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Millions more have experienced deepening poverty, school dropout and discrimination as a result of the epidemic.

AIDS has left virtually no country, rich or poor, untouched. In the countries where adult HIV prevalence has reached more than 1 per cent in the general population, HIV and AIDS is directly affecting millions of children, adolescents and young people. In the hardest-hit countries, health systems are increasingly losing their capacity to treat and care for children and their families. Schools are becoming dysfunctional, losing their teachers due to illness and death. Farmers, men and women, are becoming too sick to farm. Affected families are selling their assets, spending increasing amounts on health care while becoming poorer. Even children who are spared a family bereavement often lose their teachers and classmates, their neighbours and role models to AIDS.

Children under 15 in South and East Asia are the largest group of children living with AIDS and dying from the disease outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
HIV prevalence is growing rapidly in Eastern Europe and parts of Central Asia.
In Latin America low national prevalence is disguising epidemics that are concentrated in major urban areas and among certain populations.
In countries in the Middle East and North Africa potential epidemics are being overlooked, in part because of cultural inhibitions against discussing sexual and reproductive health.

National governments and the international community have made important advances in tracking the growth of the pandemic and projecting its likely trajectory. Most countries now have plans for large-scale prevention programmes. There have been rapid improvements in AIDS treatment and significant reductions in its cost. For example, in 2006 over 127,000 HIV positive children benefited from AIDS treatment programmes, an increase of 70 per cent from 75,000 in 2005.

Political leadership of the fight against HIV and AIDS is growing. Global funding for HIV and AIDS has increased from $6.1 billion in 2004 to $10 billion in 2007.

But children have been largely missing from the picture.

Increasing numbers of children are entering the world infected with the virus, diminishing their chances of survival.
Increasing numbers of adolescents and young people are contracting the virus every year, threatening their hopes for the future.
Increasing numbers of parents are dying, leaving infected, affected and vulnerable children, including large numbers of orphans, behind.
Increasing numbers of children are traumatized as their parents, guardians and teachers sicken and die.

Yet the needs of children are being overlooked when strategies on HIV prevention and treatment are drafted, policies made and budgets allocated. And investments in prevention continue to be pitifully inadequate.

A generation of children and adolescents has never known a world free of HIV and AIDS. They will soon inherit the burden of fighting the disease. Although they are most vulnerable to infection, they are more likely than adults to change their behaviour.

Yet very few of them know what to do to avoid the disease. If they did, they could be full partners in the fight to stop it. The world must act now to keep the next generation free of infection as they pass from childhood through adolescence to adulthood.