The Role of the Education Sector in Providing Care and Support to Orphans and Vulnerable Children in Lesotho and Swaziland

As the HIV epidemic continues to unfold across southern Africa, countries are still struggling to find effective means to address many of its negative impacts at individual, family and community levels. One of the most complicated challenges is how to support the growing number of orphans and other children made vulnerable, or made more vulnerable, by the direct and indirect effects of HIV on their households. In particular, there have been many individual and institutional efforts to assist these children through schools and other educational services and institutions. But there has been little research into the actual impact of most of these interventions.The Open Society Education Support Program (ESP) and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) have been involved in some of these programs and came to the realisation that too many interventions within the education sector have not been adequately documented nor have they been evaluated rigorously enough to be certain that they are producing positive lasting benefits for the children. So ESP and OSISA agreed to fund a study of multi-sectoral efforts to assist orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) through schools in two of the countries most affected by the epidemic, Lesotho and Swaziland.In particular, the study was intended to probe in greater depth, and within the more systematic frame of a research methodology, the achievements of two current initiatives in each of the countries.The four cases described in this report each present an innovative approach to improving the care and support of vulnerable children within schools. Some of that support is direct and individually focussed (Lesotho Girl Guides Association and Moya Centre), while some is more indirect and focussed on strengthening systems and general community capacity (World Vision Lesotho or the Bantwana Schools Integrated Programme). However, what is common across all cases is the magnitude of the need within communities, not only for the support of vulnerable children but also for the community as a whole