Almost 60% of children living in communal and commercial farms in Zimbabwe are being exploited as cheap labour, a non-governmental organisation has claimed.

Government has crafted a framework to be applied by all registered children's homes for the care and protection of children in their custody.

About 14 000 out of the 47 000 children born to HIV positive mothers in Zimbabwe this year will be infected because of gaps in the health delivery system, the Minister of Health and Child Welfare, Henry Madzorera has said.

Childline is a non-profit making non-governmental organisation, established with the support of the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare for the purpose of providing children with a 24-hour toll-free crisis line.

At Pretoria-based Tshwane Home of Hope, the jubilant young faces of the girls who live there hide the truth of the horrors they have encountered. On the premises is a trauma centre - aptly dubbed by one of the residents as "the hope sanctuary" - here the girls meet with a resident social worker and psychologist to share their stories, stories that will never leave the four walls of the room.

A five-country study by the Southern African AIDS Trust (SAT) in partnership with the Health Economics and AIDS Research Division (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal did just that, and the picture that has emerged is more complex than many prevention programmes targeting youth have allowed for.

The number of women who die in childbirth in the country has doubled in the past decade because of the poor state of the health delivery system, a senior government official has said.

Zimbabwe's prisons cannot adequately cater for juvenile and female inmates with children and there is a need to build more friendly structures for them so that rehabilitation programmes could run efficiently, an top official has said.

The Ministry of Health and Child Welfare is set to receive a paltry US$100 million in the 2011 budget against its bid for USS$534 million amid revelations that 70% of diseases and deaths in the country, caused by malnutrition, diarrhea, malaria and pregnancy-related complications, are preventable.

In an effort to curb child and maternal mortality rates in Zimbabwe, the United Nations and the World Bank are supporting a $700 million Government initiative to increase spending on the provision of health services in the country over the next three years.