Nearly 28 million African children to be orphaned by AIDS

DURBAN, South Africa - Nearly 28 million African children are expected to lose at least one parent to AIDS by 2010, leaving a continent plagued by a generation of devastated youth, according to a report released Thursday.

''The potential for social ... instability is pretty significant,'' said John Williamson, co-author of the report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, released at the 13th International AIDS Conference.

''You have a very substantial proportion of your population that has been undereducated, malnourished, marginalized, is disaffected, not able to go to school.''

Currently there are nearly 16 million children under the age of 15 who have lost at least one parent to the disease. About 90 percent of these orphans are in sub-Saharan Africa.

That number will swell to 30 million by 2010, with 28 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report, ''Children on the Brink 2000.''

That estimate does not include the mass of children born with the virus that causes AIDS, since most of them will likely die before they reach age 5.

Many of the millions of children already orphaned have no one to care for them and are often simply abandoned to the streets.

''There are children out there who go without a meal a day. They actually go without schooling,'' said Grace Mguni, who oversees projects for orphans in townships outside of Johannesburg.

Even before their parents die, many of these children are forced to leave school to care for their ailing parents or to support the family.

''AIDS is changing the social landscape in the most affected countries,'' Williamson said. ''It's creating an unprecedented set of child welfare problems.''

As important as the loss of education and economic security is the loss of a loving environment, said Tony Barnett, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain who has studied the social and economic impact of AIDS.

''There is a cost and we don't know how to measure it,'' he said.

The deaths of so many parents will also ''rupture the intergenerational bargain,'' forcing elderly Africans who were traditionally supported by their children to return to work to support not only themselves but their grandchildren, Barnett said.

According to the USAID report, about one in three children in Namibia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and South Africa will have lost a parent by 2010, most of them to AIDS.

''The HIV pandemic is producing orphans on a scale unrivaled in history,'' said Susan Hunter, the other report author.

While famine, wars and other disease outbreaks leave large numbers of orphans, those are short-term calamities that quickly end, Hunter said. AIDS will continue to create millions of new orphans for decades.

The best way to deal with the crisis is not to put the children in expensive, but often substandard, orphanages, Williamson said, but to support their extended families and communities to help them cope.

Governments also need to protect the inheritance rights of widows and orphans, he said. Those rights are often ignored in many African communities, and a deceased man's property may end up going to his brother instead of his wife and children.

The scope of the orphan problem has been clear for years, but only recently have people begun to act, Barnett said.

''The tragedy of all this is that it's taken so long,'' he said.