Factors leading to the establishment of child- headed households: the case of Zimbabwe

This paper analyses factors associated with the establishment of 43 childand adolescent-headed households in Manicaland, Zimbabwe. Such households result from the rapid increase in numbers of parental deaths leading to overburdening of the capacity of relatives to fulfil their traditional role of caring for orphans. Most children living in child and adolescent headed households have had both parents die in the preceding five years; many of them receive regular visits and support from relatives. Child-headed households represent a new coping mechanism in response to the impact of AIDS on communities. Community groups can help extended families to cope with the burden of orphans by encouraging the establishment of volunteer-based visiting programs to atrisk households and by channelling essential material support to destitute families. The number of children being orphaned is rapidly increasing in communities with high rates of HIV infection; by mid-1996, it was estimated that nine million children had lost their mother to AIDS, with over 90 per cent of affected children living in sub-Saharan African countries (UNAIDS 1996). The epidemic is leading to a decreasing proportion of adults in the population and reduced incomes of affected households (Gregson et al. 1994; Leighton 1996:76). As a result of the impact of AIDS on communities, changes are taking place in caregiving arrangements for affected children (Foster et al. 1995); an increasing proportion of orphans are now in the care of the elderly and the very young (Foster et al. 1996; Saoke, Mutemi and Blair 1996:55). The emergence of households headed by children sometimes as young as 10-12 years old is one of the most distressing consequences of the epidemic. The appearance of child-headed households in communities affected by AIDS is a recent phenomenon with cases noted in the late 1980s in the Rakai district of Uganda (WHO 1990; Alden, Salole and Williamson 1991) and Kagera region of Tanzania (Mukoyogo and Williams 1991). In 1991, such households were observed in Lusaka, Zambia (Ham 1992), Manicaland, Zimbabwe (Foster et al. 1995) and, for the first time, in six villages in the Masaka district of Uganda, where previously no such households had been noted (Naerland 1993). In the United States, cases of teenagers caring for younger siblings after deaths of parents from AIDS were reported in 1993/94 (Levine 1995:194). In the Rakai district of Uganda, two per cent of orphans were living in households with a carer who was 18 years old or less and 97 per cent of orphan households had an adult of 17 years or more living in the household (UNICEF 1994; Nalugoda et al. 1997). Zambia and Uganda were estimated to have 3.8 and 2.4 per cent respectively of children under 15 years maternally orphaned by AIDS in 1995, increasing to 5.5 per cent and 3.5 per cent by the year 2000 (Michaels 1994). By 1996 in Zimbabwe, it was estimated that eight per cent of children under 15 years were motherless because of AIDS and this was projected to rise to 16-22 per cent by 2001 and 24-40 per cent by 2011 (Gregson et al. 1996). It seems likely that once households headed by children start to appear in communities affected by AIDS, their numbers and relative proportion will both rise as the cumulative total of orphans continues to increase. Though it is often assumed that the presence of these households in communities implies that extended family methods of support have broken down, this assumption has not been validated since there have been no previous studies of