BACKGROUND This study explored community perceptions of cultural beliefs and practices that may increase sexual risk behaviour of adolescents, to understand more about meaning they hold within the culture and how they expose adolescent orphans and non-orphans to higher risks in a high HIV and teenage pregnancy prevalence context. METHODS Using a qualitative descriptive cross-sectional design ...

An orphan in a distributed transaction system is an activity executing on behalf of an aborted transaction. Orphans are undesirable because they waste system resources and because they may observe inconsistent data. This paper proposes a new method for managing orphans created by crashes and by aborts. The method ensures that orphans are detected and eliminated in a timely manner, and it preven...

This paper examines the impact of the weakening of the extended family on the education of double orphans in Lesotho through in-depth interviews with participants from 3 of the 10 districts in Lesotho. The findings reveal that in Lesotho the extended family has not yet disintegrated as the literature suggests. However, it shows signs of rupturing, as many orphans reported that they are being ta...

Using data from a longitudinal surveillance study from rural South Africa, we investigated the odds of sexual debut, pregnancy and HIV infection of 15- to 19-year-old adolescents by parental survival. Using descriptive statistics and logistic regressions, we examine the relative risk of orphans compared with non-orphans to have ever had sex, being pregnant and being HIV infected, adjusting for ...

The care of AIDS orphans in several regions of Uganda has recently been studied. The study also investigated how the various societies in Uganda have coped with the orphan problem since the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Changes in past and present coping mechanisms are discussed, with recommendations made for the future. Data were collected during 1992 from 241 men and 218 women in focus group...

In this paper, we examine how orphanhood affects children’s educational and health outcomes in eleven sub-Saharan African countries. Our analysis is based on a comparison of orphans and non-orphaned children living under the same conditions. We also examine the impacts of various family structures and compare social orphans (non-orphaned children not living with a biological parent) to orphans....

“In at least one important dimension — school enrollment — orphans are signifi cantly disadvantaged... Although poorer children in Africa are less likely to attend school, the lower enrollment of orphans is not accounted for solely by their lower wealth. Instead, our results suggest that the special disadvantage orphans face is primarily due to their living arrangements. Across a large number o...

Using 10 nationally representative surveys conducted between 1993 and 2005 we assess the extent to which the vulnerability of orphans to poorer educational outcomes has changed over time as the AIDS crisis deepens in South Africa. In line with the existing literature we find that at every point in time orphans are at risk of poorer educational outcomes with maternal deaths generally having stro...

Background: Children entering foster care have a higher prevalence of clinically significant depressive symptoms than children reared at home. Objective: The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence and predictors of depression among orphans in Dakahlia governorate orphanages. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study included all the 200 orphans in orphanages of Dakahlia governorate, E...