Zimbabwe's Health Crisis, a brief outline

Zimbabwe has a population of about 7 million people which is largely diffused in the rural areas. Subsistence farming predominates

Many Zimbabweans are now displaced; around 3 million are in South Africa, 1 million in the U.K. and 2 million between the USA and Australia.

It has one of the world’s highest levels of HIV infection, officially quoted at 25%.  It is thought that up to 7 thousand die weekly from AIDS-related infections although, with a widely dispersed population and limited access to medical facilities, this figure may be considerably higher. In ten years life expectancy has reduced from an average of 75 to 36 for men and 32 for women. There are thought to be at least 1.5 million orphans there.

The most vulnerable group is, as always, the children. Due to HIV/AIDS, many parents are dying young, grandparents are increasingly overburdened with the numbers of grandchildren they have to support and of course they have lost the traditional help from their own children. As the grandparents die, many households are being headed by children who themselves have few options to support dependants, and many have to turn to prostitution, begging and crime to survive.

In addition Zimbabwe is suffering from a well-documented economic crisis with runaway inflation, empty food shops, no fertiliser, no stock feed, no cement etc; the list is endless. The UK charity has recently had to source mosquito nets in South Africa as there are none in Zimbabwe.

Figures and facts such as these are difficult to take in; the sheer scale of this disaster cannot easily be encompassed and indeed the full impact will not be fully known for years.

Although these facts are depressing, the simple statistics hide complex stories of individual loss and pain; the scale of Zimbabwe's crisis seems to dwarf any individual effort to stem the flood. They also provide distraction from another truth, the laughing children in these photos. The smallest of gestures can and does create change; in short, we can all do something small that creates a profound impact for people who desperately need it.