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UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Roger Moore returns from visit to Zambia 13 November 2002 UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, Roger Moore returned this week from his emergency mission to Zambia where 2.4million people face one of the most complex, long term and rapidly growing humanitarian crises the world has seen, the root cause being HIV/AIDS. Accompanied by his wife Kristina, Roger Moore visited some of the households and communities worst affected by the drought, food shortages and HIV/AIDS in Zambia's Southern Province, as well as UNICEF-funded street children projects in Lusaka, nutrition units and water and sanitation projects in rural villages. "Zambia was horrendous" he stated on his return from the field. "I've seen hunger before on my UNICEF travels, but never in this way. Never hunger without hope." He continued, "It is AIDS which is exacerbating the situation in Zambia and across Southern Africa, making this emergency different from droughts and crises that have gone before. In the past there was always an adult around to do the work - to plant seeds and plough the fields. Now, with 1 in 4 people in the region HIV positive the adults are too sick to work, or have already died, and it is the children, some as young as eight or nine, who are left to cope alone. This is where UNICEF is focusing its work." The last great food crisis in Southern Africa was in 1992. It affected 18 million people and was almost exclusively drought-related. Today's crisis is far more complex. Erratic weather conditions including drought and floods across the region have played a large role in the failure of crops, but it is the exceptionally high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates that have had a catastrophic impact. An estimated 25 per cent of people in the productive age group (15-49 years) are living with HIV or AIDS. Sickness and premature death have caused the working capacity of the average household and the wider agricultural sector to drop drastically. An HIV-affected household can see its income fall by up to 80 per cent and its food intake reduce by 15-30 per cent. The effect is self evident. Across Southern Africa 14.4 million people are in need of urgent assistance.
In past droughts, which occur like clockwork every dozen years or so in Southern Africa, families and communities have survived through a variety of "coping mechanisms" or temporary strategies for bad times. These include skipping meals, relying on extended family networks and personal reserves, traditional food gathering skills and humanitarian relief. The current crisis has seen a change. Instead of these coping strategies, people are desperately turning to "survival strategies". People are selling off productive assets such as land and livestock, and drawing up debt in the process. This undercuts family and community resilience and means their potential for an eventual recovery is lessened. These more extreme "survival strategies," include high-risk behaviours such as exchanging sex for food or cash, or migrating for casual labour and further fuel the crisis by increasing HIV rates even further. And with HIV/AIDS, hunger becomes a much greater peril. People living with HIV or AIDS deteriorate quickly if they are hungry or malnourished. Sickness and early death, the hollowing out of the productive age-group means that fewer adults must support more people who have greater consumption needs. Farmers are shifting from labour-intensive, nutrition-rich crops to crops that are less labour-intensive but which have less substantial nutritional content. This is a year-on-year crisis, not a time-bound natural cycle with little lasting impact. The assets and reserves of families and communities are quickly diminishing; traditional experience in how to cope with drought is being snuffed out before it can be handed down. The burden of care has shifted to the weakest, the most marginalised, and the most voiceless especially women and children. Describing his mission in more detail Moore says: "I visited outlying villages where people have to walk miles to get food. They go out foraging for fruits, nuts and even roots. It was horrifying to see orphaned children that had not seen food for 36 hours. How can they concentrate on empty stomachs at school? All they feel is hunger." The education system is severely threatened by teacher absenteeism and death. The demands on children from households facing lost income and the need to care for sick and dying family members are leading to high drop-out rates and significant reductions in primary school enrollment. UNICEF is working to keep children in schools by making them more child-friendly: developing gardens that are an important source of food; improving sanitation and water; and providing learning and teaching materials for students and teachers. Roger Moore's mission took him to the remote communities where UNICEF is working to identify child-headed households so that they can benefit from food distribution and other interventions. With Governments and other partners, UNICEF is carrying out and expanding immunisation, vitamin A delivery, and de-worming activities in all countries for children whose immune systems are weakened by malnutrition or HIV infection. UNICEF is expanding HIV/AIDS awareness and education programmes
across Southern Africa. In Zambia, Roger Moore and the UNICEF
delegation visited Simukumbo School in Southern Province. The newly
formed ' 'AIDS club' showed Mr Moore exactly what they thought of
AIDS - by performing a song with a strong AIDS message. Children of
all ages are taught about the spread and prevention of AIDS at the
club and they had put together a song and posters for the arrival of
their guests. They passionately sang, to a captive and emotional
audience: " AIDS is a terrible pandemic! In the long term the crisis affecting Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Malawi will continue the reversal of development gains and ensure the failure of the Millennium Development Goals. Responses to date have been clearly inadequate. UNICEF believes that this humanitarian crisis requires an entirely new paradigm of assistance and intervention. To donate to UNICEF's Africa Children's Emergency Appeal please click here.
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