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Danette Breitenbach 23 Apr 2025








Children born to mothers with HIV are known as HIV-exposed. While many children who are HIV-exposed and also HIV-uninfected are growing and developing well, some face greater risks.
They are more likely to be hospitalised with severe infections when they are infants. They are also at higher risk of dying before their second birthday. And the risks are even higher when babies who are HIV-exposed and uninfected are born early, with low weight at birth, or to mothers with severe HIV disease.
This is why it’s important to know as much as possible about this population of children, how many there are and where they are in the world.
We used the most recent UNAIDS estimates, published in July 2019, to calculate the share of each country in the global total of children who are HIV-exposed and uninfected. These estimates allow us to report on changes in the size of this population and trends over time, between 2000 and 2018. And we calculated the percentage of children who are HIV-exposed uninfected in countries with the highest HIV burden.
We found that in 2018 there were 14.8 million children who were HIV-exposed and uninfected around the world. This population has more than doubled from 6.7 million in 2000.
Ninety percent of all these children are from sub-Saharan Africa. Strikingly, half of all children who are HIV-exposed and uninfected come from just five countries – South Africa, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Nigeria.
Africa alone accounts for 3.5 million or 24% of all children who are HIV-exposed and uninfected.
Equally alarming is that in four southern African countries more than 20%, or at least one in every five children, is HIV-exposed and uninfected – Eswatini (32%), Botswana (27%), South Africa (22%) and Lesotho (21%).
The substantial global population of children who are HIV-exposed and HIV-uninfected needs a coordinated strategy to reduce HIV exposure in children and to ensure their optimal health and wellbeing. Informed by these estimates, we propose a coordinated global strategy for improving their health outcomes.
This strategy requires collaboration from governments and their partners, including multilateral organisations, researchers and funders. It must be built on a strong foundation of dialogue with families and communities affected by HIV, who have seldom been consulted on the wellbeing of their children when they are HIV-uninfected.
Our proposed strategy has three pillars:
There are large numbers of children who are HIV-exposed and HIV-uninfected in southern Africa – and they are not surviving and thriving as well as children born to women without HIV. There is an urgent need in this region to find solutions enabling all children to reach their developmental potential and contribute fully to their communities.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Conversation Africa is an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community. Its aim is to promote better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and allow for a better quality of public discourse and conversation.
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