Orphans are one of the main factors in societal instability caused by AIDS. Parents worry about who will take care of their children when they die. Certainly, in the past, traditional networks of immediate and extended families would have assumed the care of orphans. Today, the epidemic is breaking down and overburdening extended families and community resources.
Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, traditionally, the extended family-primarily maternal aunts and uncles-helped cope with child survivors. Sometimes, relatives neglect or exploit orphan relatives. Other times, unable to provide for the children, they cast them out. Oftentimes, both very elderly and very young children struggle to care for children orphaned by AIDS (Ntozi & Zirimenya, 1999). Many children are raised by other children. The emergence of orphan households headed by siblings is an indication that the extended family is under stress (Foster et al., 1995). A study of 300 orphan households in Zimbabwe in 1995 found that nearly half of caregivers of orphans were grandparents (Foster et al., 1996), and another study of child-headed households-some headed by children as young as 11 years of age-showed that in 86 percent of households both parents had died an in 93 percent, the mother had died (Foster et al., 1997a).