Crisis Foster Care in an Age of HIV and AIDS: Experiences of the Queen Mothers of Manya Klo, Ghana

Older women in communities ravaged by HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa have been hailed as constituting the most effective response to the growing number of orphans, which has overwhelmed the customary mechanisms of support. Over 80 percent of orphans in Ghana are fostered by women, because an orphan’s kinship networks - and particularly the female members of the networks - are expected to assume responsibility for her/him. Unfortunately, in the Manya Klo Traditional Area of Ghana, AIDS, poverty and other factors have weakened kinship support and cooperation, resulting in patchy external responses to physically frail and economically disempowered traditional female leaders (queen mothers) acting as caregivers. Most of the existing research about orphan care has focused exclusively on the woman-child dyad, thereby obscuring other forms of care. In particular, the “grandmother-led household” has become a self-fulfilling truism that has blinded researchers to other relationships of care. Moreover, the analyses of the situation of orphans are based on frameworks that ignore orphans' perspectives and the social context in which fostering is negotiated. In this study, I employ mixed methods to analyze an orphan care project run by the Manya Krobo Queen Mothers Association (MKQMA) and address three issues: (1) What is the socio-economic and cultural context in which queen mothers foster orphans? In particular, how do queen mothers’ positions as traditional leaders, HIV and AIDS, poverty, and external assistance programs (state and NGO) all shape the organization of orphan care? (2) What are the challenges for depending on the Queen Mothers Association to support orphans? (3) How are orphans’ needs identified and described (from the perspectives of the caregiver, the orphans and those who assist them). In particular, can community-derived measures of childcare rather than the current measures typically used in international development and children’s projects provide better indices of the needs of children after losing a parent?Ph