GRANDPARENT CAREGIVER

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING

IN THE GAMBELLA REGION OF ETHIOPIA, EAST AFRICA.

BY OKONY KONO, M.P.A, M.S.

 ABSTRACT

            Background: Custodial grandparenting is increasing and it has positive and negative effects. This study will be built on earlier studies of the effects of social support, health and well-being of both grandparent-grandchildren. Objective: To examine custodial grandparents’ health and well-being in Ethiopia. Method: Thirty-three questions 10 knowledge, 10 attitudes, 10 behaviors toward grandparents’ experiences and 4 demographics were given. Results: no significance difference between males and females.

 INTRODUCTION

        Grandparent caregiving is becoming a major concern of public health in the United States and the world since the last two decades. Grandparent caregivers’ health and well-being is the least emphasized in research. HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, violence, drug abuse, wars, have contributed to custodial grandparenting among others. Numbers of universities/colleges in the United States offer few or no courses that teach students about health and aging or many students are not interested in family/ aging studies. Contribution of custodial grandparents in the United States alone was estimated to be $17 billions of free labor per year. Truly, the contribution of grandparents raising their grandchildren has major benefits to grandparents and grandchildren also to the society as whole. The benefit of custodial grandparenting can be determined by many factors such as family conditions, culture, religion, and national welfare. Further, structure of national welfare system, culture, socioeconomics status of certain groups within major population can cause much constrains on custodial grandparents than benefits.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

  

The main purpose of this proposal is to examine grandparent caregivers’ health and well-being in the Gambella region of Ethiopia, East Africa using cognitive theory, family stress theory, and stress process model. The people of Gambella, a speaker of “Anyuak/Luo,” whose their language is also called Anyuak and because of the history of their region and its people, the language has not been recorded until a decade ago. As a result, they rely on the elderly for general wisdom, storytelling, history of their people, and their land and its boundaries. In the past, Anyuak people used their parents as secondary caregivers. For example, when a young couple had a newborn, they would take the older children to live with their grandparents so their new-born sibling would not disturb them and they do not disturb the new child. In the same way, if the couple had to travel to visit relatives, they would leave their child with their parents.

In recent history, things have changed dramatically because of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, emerging communicable diseases, violence, teen pregnancy, drug addicts, political unrest just to name a few. Today, families have been torn apart and many young children have been orphaned by the deaths of parents. The HIV/AIDS pandemic alone has left thousands orphans in sub-Sharan African countries (Shetty & Powell, 2003). Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS, 2005), shown morbidity and mortality rates are highest in sub-Sharan Africa, with equal losses of men and women between the ages of 20 and 45.

  Even though the Population Reference Bureau, , excluded Ethiopia from the list of top 15 HIV/AIDS in 2005 countries in Africa; it is among the African countries that is experiencing great suffering from the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Abera (2003) estimated that one in every 13 adults in Ethiopia is infected with HIV/AIDS.

In most recent data in Gambella specifically, HIV/AIDS rate is 4% (Woldemeskel, Y., & Chekol, A. 1997). Morbidity and mortality due HIV/AIDS/TB is critically high between the ages 18 and 45 year olds, and is particularly devastating for males in those age groups. Because of the HIV/AIDS catastrophe, life has changed dramatically for grandparents. Due to deaths of their children or their relative’s children, they have increasingly become the primary caregivers. In the past two decades, the numbers of grandparents raising grandchildren in the United States has also steadily increased due to HIV/AIDS, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, mental illnesses, and violence. Between 1980 and 1990 there was close to a 44% increase in the numbers of grandchildren residing with grandparents or relatives (Minkler & Thomson, 1999; Saluter, 1992). Minkler and Thomson also indicated that about 4 million children in 1997, or 4.1% of White, 6.5% of Hispanic, and 13.5% of African American children, were in their grandparents’ custody. The authors stated that “skipped generation” was displaying the fastest growth in the nation. Skipped generation was defined as families in which neither of the children’s biological parents was present. 

Certainly, the prevalence of skipped generation in Gambella is also growing at a fast pace because of HIV/AIDS pandemic, emerging communicable diseases, violence, teen pregnancy, drug addicts, and political unrest or related violence. Because Gambella is one of the poorest regions of Ethiopia, these issues are easily overlooked. At the same time, they represent enormous public health and gerontological concerns.

Because of the above issues, my future trip to Gambella, I would like to assess the health, well-being, self-rated health viability, and other related burdens of the grandparenting constrains.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

 Family Stress Theory and Stress Process Model were utilized to describe the experiences of grandparent caregivers. Theory of social cognitive assisted the investigator to understand the interactions between persons, environment, and behavior. In recent studies of grandparent caregiving, family stress theory was used as a guiding framework (Crowther & Rodriguez, 2003; Giarusso, Feng, Silverstein, & Marenco, 2000; Sands & Goldberg-Glen, 2000).