According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.3 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During 2009 some 2.6 million people became newly infected with the virus and an estimated 1.8 million people died from AIDS. The vast majority of people with HIV and AIDS live in lower- and middle-income countries. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.
The seed of Keep a Child Alive was sown in Kenya in 2002. Royalties from Leigh Blake’s previous fundraiser, Red Hot & Blue, built the AIDS Research and Family Care Clinic in Mombasa. A woman named Anne walked in to the clinic, desperate to obtain the anti-retroviral drugs her three-year-old son Brine needed to survive. At the time the medication’s high cost was an impossible dream for most Africans to afford, and Leigh was so moved by this woman and her courage that she decided to pay for them.
Word of the children’s desperate need for medication spread among Leigh’s friends and colleagues, and soon they were offering to do the same. KCA Board Member Peter Edge became its first donor, and soon Alicia Keys passion for the issue drove her to become its first Global Ambassador.
What started as a very personal incident between two mothers has become a tremendous initiative for change. With over 4000 children and family members on ARV treatment, over 250,000 people under our care, three orphanages receiving funding, and major clinic sites in expansion, Keep a Child Alive is making a direct impact in the lives of so many who need help.
We live in a world where more than 15 million children have been orphaned by AIDS, 14.1 million in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Keep a Child Alive, founded as an urgent response to access AIDS treatment to the poor, increasingly finds itself responding to the epidemic of orphaned and vulnerable children whose parents could not be saved in time.
In Africa, where before AIDS there was no word for orphan in any language, an entire generation of children has grown into adulthood without the love, care and protection of their parents. AIDS has decimated the extended family system: children have been robbed of their parents, and the elderly left with a generation of grandchildren to raise in their old age. Communities that once formed a safety net that absorbed children in need have long been overwhelmed by the number of orphans left by AIDS stretched beyond their limit to help.
The circumstances faced by these children in their daily struggle to survive – to find shelter, food and safety from the dangers that surround them – demand a greater response from the entire world. Keep a Child Alive is committed to supporting community-based care programs that help children living in child headed-households, care homes for children orphaned by AIDS and alone in the world, and places of safety for the growing number of child victims of rape and abuse.
Learn more about the many programs funded by Keep A Child Alive.
Get Involved:
Donate to Keep A Child Alive.
Make a mobile donation to Keep A Child Alive.
Text the word “ALIVE” to 90999 & a one-time donation of $5 will be added to your mobile phone bill or deducted from your prepaid balance. Msg & Data Rates May Apply.
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Resource: http:// keepachildalive.org
