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Background AIDS has created new vulnerabilities for rural African households due to prime-age adult mortality and is assumed to lead to impairment of the intergenerational transfer of farming knowledge. There has been scant research to date, however, on the impacts of parental death on farming knowledge of children made orphans by AIDS. The question we investigate is if there is a difference in agricultural expertise between AIDS affected and non-affected adults and children. Methods The research was carried out in rural Benin with 77 informants randomly selected according to their AIDS status: 13 affected and 13 non-affected adults; 13 paternal, 13 maternal and 13 double orphans; and 12 non-orphan children. Informants descriptions from pile sorting exercises of maize and cowpea pests were categorized and then aggregated into descriptions based form (morphology) and function (utility) and used to determine whether the moving from novice to expert is impaired by children orphaned by AIDS. Differences and similarities in responses were determined using the Fischer exact test and the Cochran-Mantzel-Haenszel test. Results No significant differences were found between AIDS affected and non-affected adults. Results of the study do reveal differences in the use of form and function descriptors among the children. There is a statistically significant difference in the use of form descriptors between one-parent orphans and non-orphans and in descriptors of specific damages to maize. One-parent paternal orphans were exactly like non-affected adults in their 50/50 balanced expertise in the use of both form and function descriptors. One-parent orphans also had the highest number of descriptors used by children overall and these descriptors are spread across the various aspects of the knowledge domain relative to non-orphans. Conclusions Rather than a knowledge loss for one-parent orphans, particularly paternal orphans, we believe we are witnessing acceleration into adult knowledge frames. This expertise of one-parent orphans may be a result of a combination of factors deserving further investigation including enhanced hands-on work experience with the food crops in the field and the expertise available from the surviving parent coupled with the value of the food resource to the household.

This paper characterises children orphaned by AIDS in the Couffo region of Benin. A 2006 census conducted for the research revealed a total of 315 such orphans, aged 0 to 14 years, within 88 households. Seventy-one percent of these children were under the care of their mothers or grandmothers, 68% were fatherless, 58% were between the ages of 7 and 12, and 68% were in primary school. An in-depth study of the orphans’ lives, undertaken to complement the census, revealed that these orphans were highly mobile between households, with almost 50% of them moving homes within a six-month period. An analysis of this phenomenon found that orphan mobility was a deliberate household strategy to manage orphanhood. Tensions arising out of care arrangements and resource allocation were among the main reasons for the high degree of orphan mobility. The context of orphan mobility also highlighted the practical role the orphans were able to fulfil within the affected households. The findings show that orphan mobility is a social phenomenon with two functions: on one hand, it may help HIV/AIDS-affected households to manage the increase in the number of orphans; on the other, it can provide an opportunity for orphans to move to a ‘safer’ environment anytime they do not feel secure. The implications for institutions providing care to orphans were also identified. Among other things, we recommend that a distinction be made between the main caregiver and the ‘endorser’ of an orphan as this was found to be an important difference. We also recommended that a distinction be made between orphans under and over the age of 10. For instance, children in the age group 10–14 years should be defined as ‘pre-adults,’ as their position within the household and their needs for services are different from those of orphans under age 10.Keywords: care provision, census, children, household resources, resource allocation, rural communities, sociology, West AfricaAfrican Journal of AIDS Research 2009, 8(3): 261–274