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| | FAQs about HIV/AIDS and World Vision's Hope Initiative
What is World Vision doing in response to the global AIDS pandemic?
How has AIDS affected World Vision programs?
Where is the need greatest?
Who are the most affected?
How are women affected?
How are children affected?
Where in Africa is World Vision working?
How many children orphaned and made vulnerable by AIDS does World Vision care for?
What services do they receive?
What prevention programming has proven most effective?
Does World Vision provide AIDS medication?
Where does World Vision get its funding for AIDS programming?
How much of World Vision contributions go to actual people in need versus administrative costs?
What is World Vision’s policy on use of condoms as a preventive measure?
What is World Vision’s policy regarding encouraging breastfeeding or use of formula among mothers with HIV?
How much difference can World Vision hope to make in light of the magnitude of this crisis in Africa?
Q: What is World Vision doing in response to the global AIDS pandemic?
A: World Vision operates AIDS prevention and care programs in more than 60 countries. The organization’s work is particularly focused on meeting the needs of millions of children who have been made vulnerable because of the pandemic, especially those who have lost parents to AIDS-related causes. AIDS awareness is also a significant aspect of World Vision development programs, which provide long-term aid to communities pursuing self-sufficiency.
In December of 2000, World Vision launched The Hope Initiative, a global effort focused on high-prevalence and high-risk countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Our national offices, supported by regional AIDS Advisors and the Hope Initiative Models of Learning team, implement comprehensive responses to AIDS. These responses focus on prevention, care and advocacy. Integrating our AIDS response with existing World Vision efforts in child health, micro-enterprise development, food security, education and peace building, is also a focus.
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Q: How has AIDS affected World Vision programs?
A: Rising child mortality rates and falling life expectancies indicate that much of the development progress made in recent decades is being lost.
For example, in hardest-hit areas, an emerging middle class has been pushed below the poverty line by loss of income and medical bills. Many of the poorest families never see a medical bill; few have seen a doctor, and even fewer can afford AIDS medications (anti-retrovirals; also referred to as ARVs).
As a generation of parents is lost to AIDS, grandparents become the guardians often of 10 or more children. If grandparents are gone, older siblings, some of whom are not even in their teens, raise families. These children often must quit school to earn a living.
AIDS creates an overwhelming need for new services, including prevention education, care for people living with HIV or AIDS and support for surviving children and families. Because these and other factors contribute to its spread, AIDS is addressed in the context of poverty, unemployment, lack of education, prostitution, child sexual abuse and the low social status of women in many African cultures. Women are often powerless to insist that their partner wear a condom or even remain faithful.
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Q: Where is the need greatest?
A: Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the United Nations, nearly 25 million Africans are living with HIV or AIDS, and in some of the hardest-hit countries, more than a fifth of the population carries the virus. The adult rate of infection is 6.1 percent in Africa as compared with a world average of 1.0 percent. The vast majority of countries with the highest HIV and AIDS prevalence rates are in Africa. Within Africa, prevalence varies by country and region. While West Africa's average is 3.4 percent and East Africa is at 4.9 percent, Southern Africa has an alarming 11.6 percent infection rate.
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Q: Who are the most affected?
A: Of the more than 38 million people living with AIDS worldwide, more than 25 million are African. Of that group, 54 percent are women. In part because of cultural limitations on female rights and freedoms, more African women are infected than men. In addition, 2 million HIV-positive Africans are younger than 15 years of age. Children are most often infected in utero or during breastfeeding; more than 90 percent of adult infection is through sexual transmission between a man and a woman.
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Q: How are women affected?
A: For physiological and social reasons, women and girls are particularly susceptible to sexual transmission. Often bound by cultural traditions that afford them a much lower social standing than men, they cannot control the sexual behavior (including adultery) of their husbands, and have no voice in contraception. Because of poverty and little education, the effects of which afford desperately few options, many women seek income as sex workers, further spreading the disease. Ignorance about AIDS exacerbates the situation. For example, many men believe that having sex with a virgin will cure the disease. As a result, child molestation and rape are common in many places.
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Q: How are children affected?
A: Two million African children younger than 15 are HIV-positive or live with full-blown AIDS — almost 90 percent of the worldwide number of children directly affected by the pandemic.
In countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe, AIDS has increased the under-five mortality rate by more than 50 percent. In addition to those who are living with HIV, orphaned children are one of the most significant populations in need of support.
In Africa, 12 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS; worldwide, that number is estimated at 15.2 million — and by 2010 is expected to reach nearly 20 million (some 16 million in Africa alone).
Roughly 30 million additional children around the world are desperately vulnerable because of AIDS, a number expected to climb to 40 million by 2010. These are children whose parents are sick, whose families have taken in extra children or who live in communities where there is not enough food, teachers or health workers because of the pandemic.
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Q: Where in Africa is World Vision working?
A: In Africa, World Vision operates in 25 mostly sub-Saharan countries, including: Angola, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
World Vision is committed to establishing an HIV and AIDS component in each of its Africa programs.
The organization also runs prevention, care and advocacy programs in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Romania, Albania, Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, the Russian Federation, India, China, Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and many other countries around the world.
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Q: How many children orphaned and made vulnerable by AIDS does World Vision care for?
A: Though the exact number is not known, World Vision cares for hundreds of thousands of children orphaned by AIDS in Africa and other regions. A significant number of World Vision's 2.4 million sponsored children — especially the more than 800,000 sponsored children in Africa — may have been orphaned or made vulnerable to the disease.
Also, World Vision mobilizes and trains volunteer caregivers to assist orphans and vulnerable children. These caregivers provide assistance to thousands more children who are not covered by sponsorship; however, the exact number is not known.
Because of the social stigma associated with the disease, it is impossible to know exactly how many orphans have lost their parents to AIDS-related causes. In fact, the prohibitive cost of HIV testing prevents many Africans from becoming aware of their HIV status or that of their loved ones.
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Q: What services do they receive?
A: For sponsored children who have lost one or both parents to AIDS-related causes, World Vision provides vital assistance that includes meeting educational, health care, shelter and other urgent basic needs. Older orphans, some of whom have become their families' breadwinners, are given vocational or agricultural training.
In addition, World Vision trains volunteer caregivers to provide continuous monitoring of children’s well-being, protection against abuse and neglect and spiritual and psychosocial support. Help in overcoming barriers to education, assisting with basic household tasks, caring for chronically ill family members, school fee assistance, food aid and other material support, when possible, is also offered.
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Q: What prevention programming has proven most effective?
A: World Vision's health professionals believe that a holistic approach to HIV prevention is most effective. World Vision encourages the biblical principles of abstinence before — and faithfulness after — marriage to prevent sexual transmission.
The organization also provides accurate information about how to reduce the risk of HIV transmission if unhealthy behaviors are chosen. In addition, it addresses HIV and AIDS as part of a comprehensive program within the context of poverty, gender disparities, warfare, lack of education and other challenges. This strategy, also known as the ABC model: Abstinence, Being Faithful and using Condoms — if one spouse is HIV-positive, or if abstinence and faithfulness are not practiced — informs Uganda's remarkable success. This East African country witnessed its HIV-prevalence rate decrease from 15 percent in 1991 to 4.1 percent in 2003.
World Vision works through schools, churches and other community groups to provide values-based life-skills training for children and youth — ages 5 to 17 years of age — to avoid behaviors putting them at risk of contracting HIV.
The organization has also found that when youth educate each other, the information tends to effect more change in behavior. The organization augments its Life-Skills training program by training youth peer HIV and AIDS educators, as well as forming peer HIV and AIDS support groups in many communities. In the first half of Fiscal Year 2006, more than 40,000 children and youth in Africa were active as peer educators; more than 6,100 peer support groups were in operation.
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Q: Does World Vision provide AIDS medication?
A: Outside of a few specific grant-funded programs, World Vision does not directly provide anti-retroviral drugs to people who are HIV-positive or who have AIDS. However, the organization provides referrals to programs that do provide ARVs, when available. In many contexts, staff are active in providing voluntary counseling and testing as well as basic healthcare, reducing the stigma that surrounds AIDS, and working in many other areas to promote and facilitate the success of ARV programs.
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Q: Where does World Vision get its funding for AIDS programming?
A: As with most World Vision programs, funds are provided by individuals, churches, corporations and foundations. The U.S. government provides cash and food commodity grants that benefit people in need, including those living with HIV or AIDS, their families and children orphaned by AIDS.
In Fiscal Year 2005, World Vision raised more than $18 million in private contributions for its AIDS programs, and over $10 million in grants from the US government, the Global Fund for AIDS and other organizations.
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Q: How much of World Vision contributions go to actual people in need versus administrative costs?
A: For the past seven years, World Vision has continued to lower administrative costs and overhead rates. In fiscal year 2004, 87 percent of revenue went to programs that benefit children, families and communities in need.
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Q: What is World Vision’s policy on use of condoms as a preventive measure?
A: In its health programs addressing HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, World Vision supports a comprehensive approach to prevention that is supported by public health evidence and biblical principles. World Vision promotes sexual abstinence outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage.
Abstinence and faithfulness represent God’s intended means of sexual and marital fulfillment. Public health evidence supports the idea that abstinence and faithfulness are most effective in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
God highly values each individual and instructs us to do all we can to preserve and enhance life. In the prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections in high-risk situations, it has been demonstrated that condoms, used correctly and consistently, can significantly reduce the likelihood of transmission and slow the spread of the epidemic.
While World Vision emphasizes abstinence and fidelity within marriage, the organization also recognizes that not all people can, or will, choose to be abstinent. Even within marriages, one or both spouses may be HIV-positive, and/or may have STIs and/or be unaware of their exposure risk. In such situations, World Vision recommends the consistent and correct use of condoms for risk reduction.
Information and education about the risk of condom failure and actions that can increase condom effectiveness to avoid the risk of failure are also provided. This recommendation is done as part of an integrated program approach, rather than as a stand alone or primary intervention. World Vision's primary message is abstinence before marriage and faithfulness after.
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Q: What is World Vision’s policy regarding encouraging breastfeeding or use of formula among mothers with HIV?
A: World Vision affirms the policies of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS: When a safe water source and sufficient supply of infant formula are not available for the full formula feeding of infants, breastfeeding should be encouraged among mothers who are HIV-positive. While the danger of breastfeeding mothers transmitting the disease to their children is substantial — 10 to 20 percent — children's risk of serious illness from unsafe water is even greater.
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Q: How much difference can World Vision hope to make in light of the magnitude of this crisis in Africa?
A: AIDS has devastated millions of African families — but there are signs of hope. Uganda was the first country to report a decline in instances of infection. Uganda's infection rate decreased from 15 percent in 1991 to 6.7 percent by the end of 2005. Similar successes have been seen in Rwanda, Kenya, Senegal, and urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in countries in the Caribbean and Asia.
World Vision hopes, through values-based life skills training — curriculum provided by Scripture Union aimed at encouraging youth to resist unhealthy behaviors — to contribute to further prevention successes in the countries in which it works. Indeed, during the first half of Fiscal Year 2006, more than 375,000 people received life-skills training through World Vision programs in 20 African countries.
In addition, the organization’s field offices have set a God-sized goal of mobilizing community-based care for more than 2 million orphans and vulnerable children by 2010. During the first half of Fiscal Year 2006, World Vision programs in Africa alone mobilized care for more than 350,000 orphans and vulnerable youth.
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|  | 1-888-511-6548 : P.O. Box 9716
Federal Way, WA 98063-9716 Who Is World Vision?
World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice.
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