Every three seconds another child living in Africa dies. Many of these children live on the streets of Africa, forced to runaway due to the dire conditions of their previous home lives. Every day thousands of children die in each city, many of their bodies emaciated or beaten beyond belief. These children of the street go through unimaginable trials, unbearable pain, and still find enough hope and optimism to work and fight to live, and for some to raise money to support their families. To understand further the desperate living conditions of runaway children in Africa, disease and poverty must be examined, previous home life must be considered, and the conditions of life on the street must be taken into account. More than 30,000 children a day in Africa die from the disease and poverty that thrive there. The diseases in Africa can include HIV and Malaria, are widely spread, and often are incurable. Many diseases are passed on sexually, and are passed to children through the rape that is common in Africa. The poverty in Africa is the worst in the world. Starvation and deh...
The issues discussed in 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa are extremely complex, as they are all interrelated and compound the severity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; however, Nolen does a tremendous job of disassembling the umbrella term of HIV/AIDS into different themes. Nolen’s presentation of poverty is very comprehensive, covering the impact of poverty on AIDS while presenting other points of view, and making the correct decision to debunk the connotation of AIDS as a “disease of poverty”. Nolen’s inclusion of all sides of the issue makes her presentation of poverty truly outstanding. Nolen accurately uses evidence and testimony to offer insight on poverty, AIDS, their connection, and their impact on each other. She correctly identifies that AIDS not only affects the lives of already impoverished people, but also sucks more people into poverty by weakening their health and removing their opportunities.
According to research from the UNICEF, there are more than 400,000 street children existing in India. They live on the streets and take on the full responsibilities of caring for themselves. Moreover, they are becoming more vulnerable to many dangers such as chronic diseases and abuses in their society. To us, a family is a matter of course. However, to these street children, a family is a strange word. They have been homeless since they were born and never had a feeling of being at home. The book A Long Way Home, by Saroo Brierley, is a story about a street child, Saroo, who born in India. Saroo’s parents comes from different religious backgrounds. His mother, Kamla, is a Hindi, while Saroo’s father is a Muslim. Accordingly, his father took a second wife and left his family when he was a baby.
AFRUCA, located in the United Kingdom, “exists to see a world in which African children can live free of cruelty and abuse at the hands of others” (AFRUCA, 2015, para 3). AFRUCA was founded out of a need to respond to the problems African children face living in the UK. To combat this social problem in the United Kingdom, AFRUCA aims to raise awareness and advocate for change, to ensure children know their rights, to promote positive parenting amongst African parents, to help develop policies to keep African children safe and to develop leadership skills in young Africans (AFRUCA,
Uganda is a small country in Africa with a population of 23,000,000 people. Most people live in very poor, rural areas and almost all of them live in poverty. Their families make less than 60,000 shillings, which is equivalent to $34.00 in America. Most of these families cannot afford to support some of their younger children, so they place them in orphanages. Currently one in twelve Ugandan children live in orphanages. Although the orphanages are funded by the government and parents pay a small amount for their children, most of them do not have enough food, medical supplies, or clothing for the children. Some families don’t have enough money to pay the orphanages and so they force their children to live on the streets, work in the public dumps to find food, or sell them into sex trafficking.
Poverty as we know it is not a new issue at all, but none the less it’s a crucial problem that plagues much of the world. So much so, that it’s been stated that three billion people live off of less than $2.50 each day (dosomething). Poverty is a debilitating state to be stuck in, it takes so much more from people than just from a financial aspect. Someone who’s suffering from poverty have higher chances of experiencing a medical problem. People in this economic state also have much lower odds at succeeding in important areas such as school or finding a job. Poverty does not use a narrow view, instead it plays effects on people in much wider variety than just financially.
These are the words of a 15-year-old girl in Uganda. Like her, there are an estimated 300,000 children under the age of eighteen who are serving as child soldiers in about thirty-six conflict zones (Shaikh). Life on the front lines often brings children face to face with the horrors of war. Too many children have personally experienced or witnessed physical violence, including executions, death squad killings, disappearances, torture, arrest, sexual abuse, bombings, forced displacement, destruction of home, and massacres. Over the past ten years, more than two million children have been killed, five million disabled, twelve million left homeless, one million orphaned or separated from their parents, and ten million psychologically traumatized (Unicef, “Children in War”). They have been robbed of their childhood and forced to become part of unwanted conflicts. In African countries, such as Chad, this problem is increasingly becoming a global issue that needs to be solved immediately. However, there are other countries, such as Sierra Leone, where the problem has been effectively resolved. Although the use of child soldiers will never completely diminish, it has been proven in Sierra Leone that Unicef's disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program will lessen the amount of child soldiers in Chad and prevent their use in the future.
Malaria (also called biduoterian fever, blackwater fever, falciparum malaria, plasmodium, Quartan malaria, and tertian malaria) is one of the most infectious and most common diseases in the world. This serious, sometimes-fatal disease is caused by a parasite that is carried by a certain species of mosquito called the Anopheles. It claims more lives every year than any other transmissible disease except tuberculosis. Every year, five hundred million adults and children (around nine percent of the world’s population) contract the disease and of these, one hundred million people die. Children are more susceptible to the disease than adults, and in Africa, where ninety percent of the world’s cases occur and where eighty percent of the cases are treated at home, one in twenty children die of the disease before they reach the age of five. Pregnant women are also more vulnerable to disease and in certain parts of Africa, they are four times as likely to contract the disease and only half as likely to survive it.
By the year 2000, 58 million people have been infected by HIV/AIDS and alarming numbers such as 22 million would have already died. And the epidemic continues to spread. HIV/AIDS historically is considered to be one of the longest running worldwide epidemics that we have ever seen, and figures cannot be placed on the true death tolls or estimation of the damage as the cycle still is yet to reach an end (Whiteside 2002). With Africa being the worst hit continent in the world in terms of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the severity of it’s prevalence; one can only begin to question whether HIV/AIDS and poverty and directly connected or the inter-linkages exacerbate one or the other. This paper aims to argue that HIV/AIDS is a manifestation of poverty, and simultaneously poverty contributes to growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Development in response both to poverty reduction and to HIV/AIDS is complicated when both have multi-dimensional and multi-faceted impacts on a society, whether it be social, economic or human development impacts. This paper will argue that pre-existing socio economic conditions within a country such as high levels of poverty, poor sanitation, malnutrition, environmental degradation and poor public healthcare systems and limited access to preventative care are crucial factors in contributing to the transfer of the infection (Pasteur: 2000, Mann: 1999).
Nearly 50,000 people, including 30,000 children, die each day due to poverty-related problems and preventable disease in underdeveloped Countries. That doesn’t include the other millions of people who are infected with AIDS and other incurable diseases. Especially those living in Sub-Saharan Africa (70%), or “the Third-World,” and while we fight to finish our homework, children in Africa fight to survive without food, or clean water. During the next few paragraphs I will give proof that poverty and disease are the two greatest challenges facing under developed countries.
When analyzing children growing up in poverty a lot of factors come into play such as their physical, psychological and emotional development. To grow up in poverty can have long term effect on a child. What should be emphasized in analyzing the effects of poverty on children is how it has caused many children around the world to suffer from physical disorders, malnutrition, and even diminishes their capacities to function in society. Poverty has played a major role in the functioning of families and the level of social and emotional competency that children are able to reach. Children in poverty stricken families are exposed to greater and emotional risks and stress level factors.
African nations regularly fall to the bottom of any list measuring economic activity, such as per capita income or per capita GDP, despite a wealth of natural resources. The bottom 25 spots of the United Nations (UN) quality of life index are regularly filled by African nations. In 2006, 34 of the 50 nations on the UN list of least developed countries are in Africa. In many nations, the per capita income is often less than $200 U.S. per year, with the vast majority of the population living on much less. In addition, Africa's share of income has been consistently dropping over the past century by any measure. In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does. Although per capita incomes in Africa have also been steadily growing, and poverty falling, measures are still far better in other parts of the world, such as Latin America, which suffers from many of the same disadvantages that Africa has.
To the United Nations, nearly a quarter of children under the age of five are expected to remain underweight in two thousand and fifteen. The World Health Organization has reported hunger and related malnutrition as the greatest single threat to the world's public health. Improving nutrition is widely regarded as the most effective form of aid. Nutrition-specific interventions, which address the immediate causes of under nutrition, have been proven to deliver among the best value for money of all development interventions. In Africa, rates have been increasing for malnourished people (Hanson 204-5). For hundreds of millions of people, starvation is a daily threat. In the poor nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, billions of hungry people face starvation. It begins with an ache in your stomach that eventually weakens your heart and stops beating. Today about five billion of the world’s five point nine billion live in poor nations. (“Hunger and Malnutrition” web).
"Trust for Africa's Orphans: Facts and figures." Trust for Africa's Orphans: Welcome. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2010.
HIV does not only affect the well-being of individuals, it has large impacts on households, communities and even nations as a whole. Peer discussions and personal research has also made me realize that some of the countries suffering from this HIV epidemic also rather unfortunately suffer from other infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, relative poverty and economic stagnation. Despite these setbacks, new inte...
... diseases such as AIDS are also becoming a problem in places like Africa. Knowledge of how to prevent these diseases is not widely known, so an increasing number of people are infected. More attention needs to be placed on adequate health care and technology in these countries. While these third world societies may not have the resources with which to implement these changes, more advanced societies certainly do.