On July 16, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations held a hearing, “The Growing Crisis of Africa’s Orphans.”
Robert Jackson, principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of African Affairs, Department of State, said, “It’s estimated that there are 17.8 million children that have lost one or both of their parents due to AIDS, and 90 percent of those live in sub-Saharan Africa.” He continued, “Children can be vulnerable to international and domestic human trafficking, whether through sex trafficking, forced child soldiering, or forced labor. AIDS orphans, including those from Swaziland and Lesotho, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Children throughout the continent are exploited in domestic servitude, forced begging, and forced labor in a variety of sectors, including mining, fishing, cattle herding, and harvesting coffee or rice. Armed conflict and other instability, poor economic conditions, food insecurity, rural poverty, and lack of social safety nets can also leave children vulnerable.”
Nancy Lindborg, assistant administrator for democracy, conflict, and humanitarian assistance, US Agency for International Development (USAID), stated that the endemic abuse of women and children also has contributed significantly to this crisis and, “[w]hile the overall number of children experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect in Africa is not known, we can extrapolate from startling statistics.” She continued, “In the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], 64 percent of women have experienced physical violence since age 15 and 71 percent report some form of sexual, mental, or physical abuse by a spouse or partner. And of the more than 17,000 cases of rape reported in 2009, 58 percent of victims in reported sexual violence cases were under the age of 18. A UNICEF study in Swaziland found that nearly one in four women experienced physical violence as children, one in three experienced sexual violence, and three in ten were emotionally abused.”
Dr. Shimwaayi Mintemba, founder, Zambia Orphans of Aids, stated that abject poverty and poor health care for women has also contributed to the crisis. For example, “Cervical cancer threatens the lives of many women. Inadequate early detection facilities have contributed much to this. For example, a woman in the United States of America has a 70 percent chance of surviving cervical cancer. In Africa, she has a 21 percent chance…Challenges that public health services have faced against a backdrop of poverty make it almost impossible for the majority of women in Africa to access available resources for managing cervical cancer. As in the case of malaria, we do not have the exact figures of orphans this disease has created. But in the absence of armed and civil conflicts, after AIDS, the two have contributed significantly to deaths of parents and creation of orphans.”
The following witnesses also testified:
