Kagera, a northwestern region on Lake Victoria in Tanzania and south of the Ugandan boarder, has been till recently part of the epicenter of HIV/AIDS in the world.

“Sub-Saharan Africa is now home to 29.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Approximately 3.5 million new infections occurred there in 2002, while the epidemic claimed the lives of an estimated 2.4 million Africans in the past year leaving behind 14 million orphans expected to reach 40 million by the year 2010. Ten million young people (aged 15 – 24) and 3 million children under 15 are living with HIV,” (UNAIDS, September, 2003).

Orphans in Kagera region are estimated at half a million out of 2.03 million inhabitants. Six years after the first case of AIDS had been diagnosed in the region in 1983, the stakeholders established *UKIMWI Orphans Assistance (UOA) in 1989 out of the grassroots efforts, to address then the immense distress placed on the orphaned children numbering 46,000, and on the households of the kinship groups raising those orphans. UOA was the first grassroots organization in the field of AIDS orphans in Tanzania, and one of the first, if not the first organization in the US to be put in place solely for the AIDS orphans.

One of the unique features of UOA is its approach of encouraging kinship members to draw from the cultural strength and kinship resources and network of caring, to link up with local communities to address the concerns of orphans. Given the enormity of the orphan crisis in Africa, with 13 – 14 million orphans, UOA believes that for any intervention to be effective in addressing the orphans’ problem, it must recognize and utilize the African cultural tradition in which the care of orphans is accepted as a responsibility of the extended family and the community at large. Grandparents, kinship and community members, local leaders, educators, business owners, traditional medical practitioners, the clergy and many more founded UOA. “The deep sense of kinship, with all it implies, has been one of the strongest forces in traditional Africa.”

(*UKIMWI is Swahili for AIDS)