Project Information

Project Rationale
Project Background
Project Partners
Project Design

Project Rationale:

Since the epidemic began, HIV/AIDS has killed millions of adults in the prime of their working and parenting lives, crippled the workforce, fractured and impoverished families, orphaned millions, and shredded the fabric of communities.

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS:

Worldwide, as of December 2001, 40 million people live with HIV or AIDS - 2.7 million of these are children under age 15.

Globally, 5 million people were newly infected with HIV in 2001 - 800,000 of these were children under age 15.

Around the world, 3 million people died of AIDS in 2001 - 500,000 were children.

AIDS killed 2.3 million Africans in 2001. An estimated 3.4 million Africans were newly infected with HIV - which means that 28.1 million Africans now live with the virus.

Over 1 in 3 adults between the ages of 15 and 49 in Botswana, Southern Africa, are infected with HIV. In Zimbabwe, the infection rate is 1 adult in 4. In South Africa, it is 1 in 5 - having risen from 2 in 100 at the start of the 1990s.

In Zimbabwe alone, over half a million orphaned children struggle to survive in a deteriorating economy.

Source: UNAIDS Epidemic Report 2000

At the start of the year 2000, World Links took a look at the HIV/AIDS situation in Africa, and decided to sponsor a new collaborative project for secondary school students, focusing on HIV prevention. The World Links Executive Director, Mr. Sam Carlson, and their Anglophone Africa Coordinator living in Zimbabwe, Mr. Anthony Bloome, saw how the AIDS epidemic affects Africans, their children, their economies and way of life, and wanted to explore how the World Links program could help.

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