What is the future of the intergenerational current in the Troubled Sea of HIVAids in SubSaharan Afr

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What is the future of the intergenerational
current in the Troubled Sea of HIV/Aids in
Sub-Saharan Africa?

• Vire Oduaran, Ph.D
• Head, Department of Adult Education
• University of Botswana
• Gaborone
• Botswana

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Statistics

• Sub- Saharan Africa have been taken out of play
  as we now have well over 13 million children
  orphaned by HIV/AIDS, a figure that could triple
  to 42 million by 2010 (Schneider and Moodie,
  2002, p.5).

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Africa Epidemic

• The epidemic is spreading fastest in the horn of
  Africa
• In Ethiopia and Kenya, the adult HIV prevalence
  rates are over 10 percent
• In Nigeria alone, there are more than three
  million citizens living with HIV or AIDS and
• In South Africa, the prevalence rate is put at
  20 with almost 4.5 million people living with
  HIV or AIDS.

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Table 2 Selected sub-Saharan African
countries with gt 4 HIV/AIDS adult prevalence  
  Data refer to end of 1999 NA Not
available Source UNAIDS, 2002
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Effects on the future of intergenerational current

• HIV/AIDS has seriously altered the focus and
  direction of the intergenerational current in
  Sub-Saharan Africa.
• The focus and direction have moved away very
  subtly from engagement with transmitting cultural
  values and the raising of grandchildren under
  conditions of peace and economic and social
  stability to confronting death with so much
  compassion and bravery, and thereby causing
  sorrows and untold hardships. Certainly, it is
  necessary to highlight how the current is being
  altered in Sub- Saharan Africa because of the
  HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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Concerns

• Schneider and Moodie (2002 p.5) argued, HIV/AIDS
  in Sub Saharan African nations has already
  begun turning into the streets rootless,
  uneducated and unnurtured young people who have a
  great potential of forming a pool of a lost
  generation of potential recruits for crime,
  military warlords, and terrorists. If as
  Schneider and Moodie (2002) suspects, our
  orphaned children do in reality become rootless,
  uneducated and unnurtured, the intergeneration
  practices in Sub- Saharan Africa will have to
  grapple with becoming more involved with
• Strengthening and transmitting to the orphaned
  children those strong traditional values that
  keep uniting us as a people under the extended
  family system.

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Concerns

• Ensuring that the orphaned children are enrolled
  in schools and helping them with their studies
  and take-home assignments as long as the
  grandparents themselves have a minimum level of
  literacy and education.
• Exploring ways and means of reversing the vicious
  cycle of poverty by forming small business
  enterprises aimed at empowering the people
  financially such that they can meet the basic
  nutritional needs of the orphaned children.

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Remedies

• HIV/AIDS engenders a multisectoral approach to
  its eradication and in this context, an
  articulate intergenerational strategy is being
  proposed (Oduaran, 2004).
• Be properly well informed.
• In this case, we need advocacy that directs
  attention to the centrality of including older
  caregivers in HIV prevention, treatment and care
  initiatives.

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Remedies

• Educate the elderly as well as the youth and
  young adults.
• Provide financial assistance.
• Provide moral support.
• Incorporating HIV/AIDS knowledge into our
  literacy programs and reading materials

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Conclusion

• HIV/AIDS is undermining virtually every segment
  of our lives.
• HIV/AIDS has devastated our educational, health,
  economic and social systems.
• Families and our traditionally vibrant extended
  family systems have been devastated.
• In like manner, the intergenerational current has
  been disturbed, altered, refocused and re-
  directed to the extent that what had been our
  pride in positive healthy intergenerational
  relationships have translated into fear, sorrow
  and profound misery. We proposed few remedies
  that need to be considered quickly and
  compassionately.