Steinhardt Professors Win $2.3 Million NIH Grant to Study Child Welfare in South Africa

By Timothy Farrell

The devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa have long been the focus of humanitarian aid organizations, researchers, and policymakers.  The country has more adults and children with HIV/AIDS (5.3 million) than any other, and recent estimates say 14.4 percent of children have lost one or both parents to the disease. Since 60 percent of South African children live in poverty, it is typical for the child to withdraw from school to earn money for the household or to care for a sick parent.

      To better understand the twin effects of poverty and parent illness and death on child development, J. Lawrence Aber, professor of applied psychology and public policy in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and colleagues have been awarded a $2.3 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to study how these factors affect children’s well-being. LaRue Allen, Raymond and Rosalee Weiss Professor of Applied Psychology at Steinhardt, and Linda Richter, executive director of the Child, Youth, Family, and Social Development program at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa, will serve as co-investigators.

      Administered by NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC), the study is the first to examine the effects of parental illness and death on children’s educational and psycho-social development. Aber, who has been studying how to minimize the effects of poverty on children for 25 years, has regularly worked in the region.

      “If you go to South Africa, you just can’t advise,” he said. “You have to roll up your sleeves.”

      The study, entitled “Well-being of South African Children: Household, Community, and Policy Influences,” will also test the effectiveness of a new anti-poverty strategy, the conditional cash transfer, which aims to raise the income of very poor households by giving money to families when they make investments in their children’s human capital, such as providing immunizations, proper nutrition, and ensuring school attendance.

      “In South Africa, the proportion of children who are AIDS orphans is not expected to peak until sometime after 2016,” said Aber. “So we have more than a decade of children losing parents to the disease, even with rollouts of anti-retroviral drugs. We need to know how we can increase the probability that children can be protected during this coming decade of continued danger.”

      The province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’s easternmost province, will serve as the project’s research setting. The area is economically representative of the entire country, and is thus “a perfect testing ground for this innovative effort,” according to Aber.