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Every year on 8 March, people around the world
celebrate International Women’s Day. This year the
focus is on the theme "Gender Equality: Building a
More Secure Future," with particular emphasis on
issues around development, human rights, security
and disasters.
In southern Africa the devastating impact of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic on millions of women is seriously
hindering the regions future. Statistics demonstrate
that both the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS
disproportionately affects women and adolescent
girls who are socially, culturally, biologically and
economically more vulnerable.
The figures are alarming. In Sub-Saharan Africa,
women make up 58 percent of people living with the
disease. In southern Africa one in four women aged
20 to 29 are HIV positive. Girls age 15 to 19 are
infected at rates four to seven times higher than
boys, a disparity linked to sexual abuse, coercion,
discrimination and impoverishment.
HIV/AIDS is an enormous development and increasingly
survival challenge in the developing world and the
factors leading to the disproportionate onus on
women are many. To reverse the global spread of
HIV/AIDS, the chains of poverty and gender
inequality that help spread the disease needs to be
broken.
All over the world, greater efforts are required to
address the concrete needs of women and girls. It is
critical at this point in the global pandemic that
efforts continue to focus on prevention, including
protection, individual behaviour change as well as
economic, cultural and social changes.
In rural areas, AIDS is undermining coping systems
that for centuries have helped women to feed their
families during times of drought and famine, leading
in turn to family break-ups, migration, and yet
greater risk of HIV infection.
With major unresolved inequalities, such as access
to education and health services, access to economic
production, disadvantaged property and inheritance
rights: AIDS stigma and discrimination is further
adding to the vulnerability of women.
As AIDS forces girls to drop out of school, whether
they are forced to take care of a sick relative, run
the household, or help support the family; they fall
deeper into poverty. Their children in turn are less
likely to attend school, and more likely to become
infected. Thus, society pays many times over the
deadly price of the impact of AIDS on women.
Generally, women and girls provide the bulk of
home-based care and are more likely to take in
orphans, cultivate crops and seek other forms of
income to sustain households.
Already, southern Africa has the highest average
proportion of female-headed households on the
continent - approximately 34% of households with
children in that sub-region are female-headed, with
an estimated 90% of AIDS care occurring within
households.
Poverty and faltering public services in many areas
are combining with AIDS to turn the care burden for
women into a crisis that has far-reaching social,
health and economic consequences. Women pay a price
beyond the immediate toil and distress. As their
time and energy are increasingly absorbed by care
duties, their opportunities to advance their
education, achieve some financial independence
through income-generation, or build skills fade.
Social welfare systems in most of the hardest-hit
countries are too flimsy to relieve these burdens.
Families, communities and governments cannot rely on
women’s fortitude and resilience alone to provide
sustainable safety nets.
Women’s work is an essential part of household and
national economies. The burdens added by AIDS entail
costs not just to women and their households but to
economies at large.
AIDS home care programmes need to be extended beyond
medical and nursing care to include counselling,
food assistance, welfare support, schooling
subsidies and income opportunities that benefit
households. Also needed are social protection and
economic support for older people and those caring
for orphans as well as, smoother administrative
procedures for accessing pensions and child support
grants, which often sustain entire families.
Information and awareness is not enough. If
prevention efforts are to succeed in the long run,
they need to address the interplay between gender
and socioeconomic inequality and vulnerability to
HIV. Prevention activities need to take into account
the unequal terms on which most women have to
conduct their lives.
What is needed is positive, concrete change that
will give more power and confidence to women and
girls, and transform relations between women and men
at all levels of society. Changes that will
strengthen legal protection of women’s property and
inheritance rights, and ensure they have full access
to prevention options, including microbicides and
female condoms. Change that makes men assume their
responsibility - whether ensuring their daughters
get an education; abstaining from sexual behaviour
that puts others at risk; forgoing relations with
girls and very young women; or understanding that
when it comes to violence against women, there are
no grounds for tolerance and no tolerable excuses.
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