'Child care projects need funding'

To the many impoverished South African children who don't have parents, a childcare worker is a ray of light in their bleak lives. At the Children First Resource Mobilisation for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children Conference, which is being held at Durban's International Conference Centre, delegates were introduced yesterday to the world that thousands of the country's youth wake up to every day.

Through visual presentations, delegates met a teenage boy who was granted custody of his siblings, a family of seven children whose mother, their only caregiver, was dying, and two children living with their grandmother in a home with nothing but a fire on the bare floor on which they slept. Zeni Thumbadoo, the Director of the National Association of Child and Youth Care Workers, said the Isibindi Programme, a model of community-based care for orphaned and vulnerable children, had already proved successful and more programmes of this kind were due to be implemented throughout South Africa as soon as funding became available.

Thumbadoo said that through the programme the workers were able to help families to create food gardens and income-generating programmes, train community workers in foster care, teach teenage heads of households life skills, and create a safe park in which children could play.

She said it was "predicted that, by 2008, 500 000 children in South Africa will be orphans as a result of the (HIV/Aids) pandemic". She said that on a salary of R1 000 a month, child and youth care workers were being lost to departments which offered higher salaries.

Linda Richter, the Director of the Child, Youth and Family Development Programme at the Human Sciences Research Council, said donors and private-sector organisations needed to help the government launch programmes for orphaned and vulnerable children.
 

Bonny Verwey
28 September 2005

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