Lydia Kayoyo has no recollection at all of her parents. They died within months of each other when she was only six years old.

Now 21, her only family souvenirs are some dog-eared photographs given to her by the grandmother who raised her.

"I don't remember anything. I have only these. These are how I know what they looked like," she said, leafing through some half dozen Polaroid-type family snaps.

Lydia became one of Uganda's estimated two million Aids orphans in 1989. Her father died first in April, her mother the following September.

"There are many like us. But we were lucky, we were so lucky," she added, casting a smiling glance at her 69-year-old grandmother a few feet away. "We had someone to look after us and we were not infected."

Lydia, her two brothers and one sister certainly are not alone.

A United Nations report released July 13 said that globally the number of children who have lost one or both parents to Aids had reached 15 million and would rise to 18.4 million by the end of the decade. The vast majority are in Africa.

"It is a tidal wave of children who have lost one or more of their parents," Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations children's agency Unicef, told the 15th International Aids Conference being held in Bangkok.

"Fifteen million globally, close to 12 million in sub-Saharan Africa alone. The orphan crisis is arguably the cruellest legacy of this pandemic and the worst could still be to come," she added. "Far too many will die."

In Africa the job of bringing up the orphaned children is often left to grandparents, ill-equipped financially and in health to do so. It poses enormous additional strains on the fabric of already poor societies. But the job is frequently accepted gladly.

When Lydia's father John died, her grandmother Zalinya Makanwagi took in and brought up his four children. At six, Lydia was the eldest.

Lydia now works with her grandmother preparing and selling food to patients, visitors and staff at a Taso clinic in downtown Kampala. A few yards away Aids victims too weak to queue for the limited medical support on offer lay and groaned on makeshift beds.

(Agencies)