Children’s Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Malnutrition in Buhaya: Advancement through women’s empowerment

Children form a vulnerable segment in society in general, given their dependence on adults for their immediate needs. The impacts of HIV/AIDS result in increasing children’s vulnerability to poverty, malnutrition, HIV/AIDS and related illness. The HIV/AIDS epidemic also causes many children to be orphaned and raised by grandparents and members of their extended family who may already struggle for their own livelihood security. This paper focuses on children’s particular vulnerability to the vicious cycle of poverty, malnutrition and HIV/AIDS in Buhaya in northwestern Tanzania, a region that has been severely impacted by HIV/AIDS for nearly three decades. Buhaya has also experienced a decline in access to fertile land and decreasing agricultural productivity for the past three decades, causing and exacerbating widespread household poverty, food and nutrition insecurity and fueling the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its cycles. In this chapter, I describe some of the very vulnerable situations children in Buhaya are living in, as witnessed during one year of field research in the village of Nsisha. I highlight the plight of children living with single mothers who are often viewed as ‘illegitimate ’ and therefore not recognized by patriarchal Bahaya clans. This precarious situation results in the deprivation of children’s rights to land inheritance as well as to basic needs such as food and nutrition security, healthcare, education and a viable future in this predominately semi-subsistence agricultural society. Given that children’s and women’s health, nutrition, and poverty work in synerg