Cape Town - Prostitution, dropping out of school to find work to feed siblings and losing homes to cover funeral costs, these are some of the stark realities Covid-19 orphans face as the pandemic takes its toll on elderly caregivers.
Orphanages in the Western Cape said they have been inundated with requests to take care of children in child-only households since the pandemic started swiping through the country.
A study released last week found that South Africa recorded one of the highest numbers of primary caregiver deaths in the world. Between March 2020 to April this year, the study showed 82 422 children were orphaned and another 94 625 had lost their primary caregivers.
UCT, in partnership with the University of Oxford, conducted the research.
Co-author of the study, Professor Lucie Cluve said the found that one in every 200 South African children had lost a primary caregiver. Other countries with similar harrowing statistics include Peru, the US, India, Brazil and Mexico.
In the Western Cape, the institutions said a grandparent and elderly aunt was a primary caregiver because of the drug scourge, the HIV epidemic and high unemployment.
Spokesperson for the Department of Social Development, Joshua Chigome said the province has seven child-headed households on record.
This has been questioned by non-governmental organisations who say that is not their reality on the ground.
Rosie Mashale, who runs the Baphumelele Children’s Home in Khayelitsha, said: “We are at capacity at the moment but get requests daily for assistance but we cannot help. The placement is done at a central office managed by the Department of Social Development.”
“We have seen so many children coming in the last year unlike the previous years because of Covid-19. In the past, we would see new children coming in every two to three months but now the requests have increased.
“The centre can accommodate 106 children but we (have) 112 because of emergency placements. So many children are left with no families to care for them, either both parents have died, grandparents or extended relatives have also passed away.”
She said they have had to start a new programme to assist child-only households which they cannot accommodate at the facility.
“We have created a programme to assist them with psycho-social support, food parcels particularly when we hit level 5 of lockdown and we created soup kitchens.
“We also assist with school uniforms, help with access to birth certificates, provide them with (informal) structures to live in because most times when there is no money to bury the parents, the family home gets sold to pay for the funeral and the children are left homeless.
“There is a great need out there and an even greater need for funding. The department cannot say there are only seven child-headed households in the province when the need is so great in Khayelitsha alone.”
Another Cape Town orphanage said it works with 15 child-headed households.
“We have seen a huge increase of primary caregivers like your grandparents, aunts and uncles who have unfortunately lost their lives due to Covid-19-related complications and suddenly kids are having to leave schools in order to feed their younger siblings because the breadwinner and main caregiver is deceased,” said the employee at the organisation, who did not want to be named in case it affected government funding.
“As an organisation, we try our utmost to fill in the gap and provide for basic needs so that kids could continue with school and we take care of siblings.
“We are working with 65 kids, of those 15 are child-headed households. We are able to house 10 kids. There might be others but because of the limited resources we are faced with, we can only do so much.”
She said older children in these households make hard decisions just to put food on the table.
“Most of them work or find other means of making a living, like prostitution. We try to make them primary caregivers so they can apply and access foster grants for their younger siblings.
“Even though primary caregivers need to be at least 16 years old, you sometimes get ones as young as 11 and that’s where social workers would seek placements or other homes.”
Bonteheuwel community leader Henriette Abrahams said circumstances exist in their community where children, who were not even orphans, find themselves living in child-headed households.
“Their parents are unable to take care of them because of substance abuse or they are not present in those children’s lives ... children that suffer from neglect, abuse, starvation, living in squalor and in need of care,” she said.
These children survive on feeding schemes.
“We see them lining up for food, some relatives even divide themselves and go to different soup kitchens in order to get food.
“But children have become more vulnerable over the last year, either due to primary caregivers dying, job loss by the family’s only breadwinner or the parents being on drugs.
“It is sad and we need the government to step up, Langa and Bonteheuwel combined only have about five social workers who are either off sick or isolating and therefore cannot attend to these issues. They (government) do not have accurate figures on children because they are not on ground.”
Chigome, however, said when dealing with child-headed households, the children were only removed if they were at risk and placed with family or in foster care.
He said the department had partnered with organisations to assist with social support, food parcels, toiletries and schoolar transport.
UCT’s Children Institute’s Lori Lake said: “We don’t have data to have a sense of what is happening to orphaning rates during Covid, there are the global modelled estimates which suggests this is a serious concern especially in the South African where children may be already living with grandmothers, who were at greater risk of getting Covid or severe infection and the risk of dying.
“But we don’t have a clear system of identifying whether there are children left at home when adults are admitted into hospital with Covid-19 or if they die.”
She said that surveillance systems needed to be strengthened to assist children who may be vulnerable not simply due to orphaning, but also in cases where their primary caregivers may have gone into hospital and left at home younger children.
“There is a great deal of work that is needed to strengthen social work or child protection services for children across the country,” said Lake.
Weekend Argus