There was a home-based community health service provided to the village of Bethanie in the North West Province in 2010. It had an unused hospice. The statistics kept by the home-based care workers showed a large number of orphans in the village as a result of parental HIV/Aids related deaths. At that time the definition of an orphan was a young person under the age of 18 with both parents dead. The UNICEF global partners definition however defines an orphan as a child under the age of 18 with one parent dead. In Bethanie, this raised the number considerably and more especially as there were what we called pragmatically orphaned children. Generally the mother had died (young) and the biological father had long disappeared or was unknown.
Result - child-headed households.
This is where the Isibindi Project came in. This community-based Child and Youth Care concept was initiated as a model primarily because of the large projected figures of expected orphans in South Africa as well as children affected or infected with HIV/Aids as a result of the pandemic. It proved over the years, that those figures were fairly accurately predicted.
PmG (Parliamentary Monitoring Group) www.pmg.org.za Child and youth headed households/PmG quotes Stats SA Household Survey as showing 90,000 children in 50,000 child-headed households in South Africa in 2015.
In Bethanie Isibindi, we identified and provided Child and Youth Care services to about 500 children in any one year from 2010 onward.
The local church in the Hartbeespoort area, where I live knew of my Isibindi Bethanie involvement and what it did.
"She's only 13 years old," said the priest. She's the oldest of three. She is the primary caregiver for the two younger ones. They live alone in a shack dwelling. It's in a settlement next to that huge plant nursery on the way to town. The problem is that she/they are helped by an 'uncle" who lives next door. He demands sexual favours in return. This 13 year old has gone into the streets to fully support her other siblings. She has become a child prostitute. Can you put an Isibindi Project there?"
The numbers didn't meet with the viability requirements. Work outside of Isibindi had to be done...the church, non-profit organisations, and well-wishing benefactors. It must be said that there were sources of help. It came as food parcels, school uniforms, shoes, clothing, school stationery and in some sibling-headed households paid voluntary work and even one-room accommodation.
State support developed slowly over the next years. but it did.
This 13 year old story sounds like an extreme, but wasn't an isolated instance.
There was always the possibility of orphaned children, child-headed households, sick mothers, unemployment putting children and young people at risk. Isibindi widened it's service delivery to include children and young people at risk. I don't know of a child prostitution instance in Bethanie at any time in my spell as the co-ordinator. There was however, an emergence of us recognising the at risk no parent households. Granny headed households, grandfather headed households, sibling-headed households ( headed by the oldest sibling, older that 18 and anything up to 25 years of age), neighbouhood supported child-headed households. Each sometimes had its own levels of risk for children and young people especially if there was the additional burden of an ailing mother in the house.
Granny headed households arose quite often. as a result of the HIV/Aids pandemic. - more than usual. It was almost a cultural norm that, if the mother and or the father, or both, were absent because of employment and temporary residence in the city, then the children went to granny. Now, more than before the absence of parent featured in the community profile.
Many grannies were old. Well past child rearing age. They seemed to get tired easily, stressed, separated from the teen culture of today. Child and youth care workers do not separate children and young people from household/family systems. Professional work, then provided support and care to the full family in its own child and youth care professional form of life-space practice. ...... and they still do.
As I said, state support started to grow. Minister Dr Skweyiya made it his 1999 to 2009 ministerial focus to introduce social grants. It resulted in established, considered child-care grants, free schooling, school meals, foster care grants, disability and unemployment grants as well as pensions. The social support grants together with a huge increase in the number of Isibindi Projects as community-based professional child and youth care services eased no parent household struggles.
In 2014 there was a state campaign to compile a register of child and youth headed households to "formalise" assistance if needs assessments were done and then linked to "therapeutic interventions and resources". Grannies, for example were able to foster children and group foster homes were established. I know of at least one instance where the court agreed to allocate foster care parenting to an 18 year old sibling and so, the financial assistance. The number of child-headed households is reducing slowly, but nonetheless reducing throughout the world and noticeably in South Africa.
We can boast of professional, quality community-based child and youth care service delivery to orphans and to no parent families.
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