HIV/AIDS results in demographic, social and economic changes in society, changes that affect the education sector . These include impacts on the demand for education, specifically enrolment trends, school attendance, drop-out and repetition rates, and the growth in the number of orphaned children. HIV/AIDS specifically affects the education sector in the following ways:

• It has an impact on the demand for education by pupils; It has an impact on the supply of educators (teachers, administrators and policy makers);
• It has an impact on the quality of education;
• It has implications for the costs of the education sector , with costs rising, and the efficiency of expenditure falling.

The demand for education by pupils is affected by the increasing expense of education for households af fected by AIDS, the opportunity cost of employment lost by childr en of school age, and the reduced number of children available for the system (due to a reduction in the birth rate, and the number of children who die before entering school). In Mozambique, where entry rates are low, as mentioned in Chapter 3, the demand for education tends to gr eatly exceed the supply. This means that the demand will remain unchanging even in the presence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and it will be supply that continues to determine levels of entry into education.

Furthermor e, the supply of education is af fected, as teachers, managers and others r esponsible for the system fallill and die, thus r educing the pr ovision of quality education. In addition, as the private and other sectors experience similar losses of skilled personnel, ther e may be incr eased poaching of teachers and managers fr om the state education system, further incr easing the loss of skilled staff .

The education sector is particularly vulnerable to the HIV/AIDS epidemic because of its high dependence on skilled human resources, and because it is necessarily dispersed throughout the country. In addition to being labour intensive in terms of human resource needs, education is skills intensive at management level. The impact of HIV/AIDS on the quality of education considers to what extent the education system produces efficient and effective results.

The analysis of the ef fects of HIV/AIDS on the quality of education assesses to what extent the epidemic affects the capacity of the education system to produce ef ficient and ef fective results (for example, the gr owing costs of education for households af fected by HIV/AIDS, the gr owing number of orphans, the increase in dr op-out and repetition rates, loss of pr oductivity in the system etc...)

Cost implications include assessing increases in unit costs due to increased drop-out and repetition levels, tional costs resulting fr om the r ecycling and training of teachers, and incr eased expenditure on medicines and medical care, and on health benefits.