10/5/2002
Teachers Dying From Aids 'Faster Than They Can Be Trained'

A new World Bank report warns that HIV/AIDS is killing teachers faster than they can be trained, threatening to derail efforts by highly-infected countries to get all boys and girls into primary school by 2015. Yet a good basic education ranks among the most effective, and cost-effective means of preventing HIV, it says.

According to the new report 'Education and HIV/AIDS: A Window of Hope,' Education systems that promote a nation's future are being gravely threatened by the epidemic, particularly in areas of high or rising HIV prevalence. World Bank President, James D. Wolfensohn, writing in a foreword to the report, says that the task of achieving education for all in countries afflicted by HIV/AIDS is extremely difficult.

"With more than 113 million children not in school in the poorest countries, [education for all] already presents a major challenge. However, HIV/AIDS makes this much greater in those countries where the education system is already struggling to grow, teachers are dying, or are too sick to teach. And every year more children are losing their parents and the support that allows them to go to school. Achieving education for all in a world of AIDS presents an unprecedented challenge to the world education community."

The scale of the AIDS epidemic is enormous, says the Bank. About 5 million people were newly infected in 2001 alone - roughly the same as in 1999 - but AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children now number some 15.6 million, following nearly 25 million AIDS deaths by the end of 2001.

UNAIDS estimates that by the end of 2001, over 40 million people were living with HIV/AIDS, including 17.6 million women, and 2.7 million children under 15. The epidemic's grip on Africa has been by far the deadliest, but no part of the world is immune. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the epicentre: average life expectancy there has now fallen to 47 years (compared with an estimated 62 without AIDS), and its prevalence rates are the world's highest - above 10 per cent in 16 countries and as high as 44 per cent in some groups (pregnant women in urban Botswana). Globally, the epidemic is on the upswing, spreading fastest in Eastern Europe.

HIV/AIDS has a profound impact on growth and poverty. UNAIDS estimates a loss of more than 20 per cent of GDP by 2020 in the worst-affected countries and a rapid increase in the number of destitute families, faced with lower income, more dependants, and sharply higher health care expenditures.