A 10 year old orphan cooks dinner
for her brothers in Mozambique.
© UNICEF-Mozambique-HIV05005
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A child-headed
household is when a child/children take over as the head of their
household and fend for themselves without any adults to look after
them.
The spread of HIV/AIDS has led to a lot of child-headed households in
parts of the world, especially in Africa. In the past, aunts and
uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, or other relatives would care
for children after their parents died. But the growing number of
children left without parents because of HIV/AIDS means that often
families can’t cope with more children as they don’t have enough money,
especially if an adult in that household also died from HIV/AIDS so
there is less income.
Child-headed households are a growing problem because children have
no-one looking out for them and are therefore vulnerable. They
often have to drop out of school to work and have to worry about where
their next meal is coming from.
Children can be treated badly by others they go to for support because
they have no economic or physical power and people might look down on
them for being the children of AIDS victims. They might be forced
to, or see no option but to join armed groups for shelter and meals,
have their parents’ property taken away from them and/or be left out on
the streets. In some countries they can’t go to the doctor
because the doctor will not see them without an adult there. They
have to ask their neighbours for support but sometimes their neighbours
are too busy to help them, or want nothing to do with them because of
how their parents died.
In Zimbabwe, orphans in child-headed households were asked about how
they are treated. Many children heading households reported that they
are made to feel like outsiders from the local community and from
relatives and treated very badly. When they were asked to
describe in what way, many answered:
- They are laughed at because of their poverty.
- Relatives and community members said their families are cursed
because there are so many deaths so people stay away from them.
- At school they children are bullied by other children.
- The older girls reported that community members no longer treated
them as children, even though they treated other girls of the same age
with parents as children. The community now saw these girls as
"mothers" and expected them to work hard to care for their younger
brothers and sisters. As a result, the girls had no friends except
those who were also heading child-headed households. (From
ZIM 2001/804: A Study on Children Affected by AIDS in Zimbabwe,
available on the International UNICEF website.)
In Rwanda, there are over 100,000 children living in child-headed
households. In Swaziland as many as one in ten households are run by
orphans.
UNICEF has been working to help find child-headed households and make
sure that these children are linked to groups and people who can help
them.
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