In most cases Woman are facing the social burden of raising children on their own, mean while man struggling to find a better job to take good care of their families. According to research many children in South Africa have grown up without their fathers. In some parts, many women who are single parents run households because their husbands have gone away to work in towns of countries across the border.

Many of the husbands/boyfriends also have died of AIDS-related diseases. Of course; many have become single parents due to increasing number of divorces. Local figures indicate that, in South Africa, there were about 27,000 divorces in 1986 and 33,246 in 1987 and 32,524 in 1989. Two-thirds of these divorces involved children.

In 1985, more than 25,000 children were products of a home run by a single parent. September 1990 data shows that 73 percent of children in South Africa come from broken homes and 150,000 children had been affected by divorce in the last four years. These figures surely have shot up by now.