Unveiling the True Scale of Africa's Orphan Crisis: Age-Specific National Estimates

Joel-Pascal Ntwali N'konzi, University of Edinburgh
Lucie Cluver, University of Oxford
Susan Hillis, University of Oxford
H Juliette T Unwin, University of Bristol
Seth Flaxman, University of Oxford

Mortality rates remain the highest in Africa with the continent facing compound crises of epidemics, climate hazards and conflicts. Children are disproportionately affected by mortality through losing parents and caregivers; orphanhood can have lifelong severe consequences due to the economic and social consequences of parental loss. We provide reliable orphanhood estimates in Africa by age of children at the country level. This has long been hampered by the lack of consistent estimates of female and male age-specific fertility rates. Our results show that around 76.1 million children aged under 18 years were orphans in Africa, of which more than two-thirds were paternal orphans (70.7% of all orphans), 51.2 million were adolescents aged 10-17 (67.3% of all orphans) and 5.8 million children were double orphans. Overall, around 1 in every 10 children and 1 in every 5 adolescents were orphans in Africa as of 2021.