Keep a Child Alive

Keep a Child Alive (KCA) is an initiative that aims to bring dignified treatment, care and support to children and families affected by HIV.

KCA founder and President Leigh Blake was first inspired to start this initiative in 2003 after an encounter at the AIDS Research and Family Care Clinic, a place which she helped fund, in Mombasa, Kenya. A woman named Anne brought her 3-year-old son Brine for medical care, refusing to leave until she received the “drugs that you have in America for your children.” Blake, who had already become involved in the AIDS epidemic using her background in the music and film industry to co-found the Red Hot Organization and Artists Against AIDS Worldwide, told Anne that she would pay for the drugs. In so doing, the idea for Keep a Child Alive was born.

The drugs were about $12000 a year through the New York University Hospital AIDS Research Department, which at that time was overseeing care at the clinic through Dr. Shaffiq Essajee. It was not long before word started to spread and friends of Blake and Essajee offered to make contributions. The first donor was Peter Edge and soon, KCA Global Ambassador Alicia Keys joined the cause, sponsoring children along with Iman and many others. In 2003, Keep a Child Alive was officially founded. The clinic in Kenya that led to Blake's vision became a model for other facilities that KCA now aspires to build throughout Africa and the developing world.

Keep a Child Alive brings attention to the already 30 million people that have been killed by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and the millions more that are threatened and orphaned by the disease. Currently there are 33.3 million people living with HIV/AIDS, including 2.3 million children under the age of 15. Despite AIDS being a preventable and treatable disease, 2.9 million people died from AIDS related causes last year, including 380,000 children under the age of 15—the equivalent of one child dying per minute.[2]

KCA's efforts continue to focus in particular on sub-Saharan Africa as it remains the worst-affected region in the world. With a little more than one-tenth of the world's population living in this area, it is home to almost 64 percent of all people living with HIV—of the overall 24.5 million infected, 2 million are children. While access to ARV therapy has increased more than eightfold since the end of 2003, only 30 percent of people in need of treatment receive it.

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