In Africa, Aids has a female face

This is the chilling conclusion by the Southern Africa HIV and Aids Information Dissemination Services (SAFAIDS) in its latest report published in March this year.
The 20-page report, entitled Integrating Culture, Women’s Rights and HIV/Aids, further states that 60 percent of the continent’s HIV positive adults are women.
It cited what it refers to as “women’s lower socio-economic, political and cultural status,” as inhibiting them from making informed sexual and reproductive health choices to prevent HIV infection.
SAFAIDS points out that women’s failure to access resources and services to cope with the impact of HIV exposes them to greater risk of earlier infection and unfair blame for transmission of the pandemic.
“It will be very difficult to win the fight against Aids because women have become a reservoir of the disease when they have no control over the methods of fighting the disease,” said Douglas Gwatidzo of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights.
“Women in Zimbabwe and Africa still fall under the vulnerable groups and have not yet attained the emancipation and respect they deserve,” he added.
The SAFAIDS report compiled from data gathered in Mozambique and Namibia highlights several traditional and cultural practices that have been identified as increasing the vulnerability of women to both gender-based violence, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
Chief among practices that negatively affect women is men’s abuse of power, men’s dominance over women and women’s subordinate positions.
Polygamy (whether formal or informal) and the acceptance of male promiscuity as “manly” also have far reaching effects on the women’s vulnerability.
The report also identifies issues of multiple, concurrent partnerships; widow inheritance and “widow cleansing” and the desire for children at all costs as leading women and men to engage in unprotected sex, even when their partner is known to be HIV positive.
The culture of silence which makes it taboo for men and women, parents and children and husbands and wives to speak about sex; and the reluctance by men to use condoms, and women’s failure to control condom (and other birth control) use, especially in marriage, were also cited as key to weakening women’s capacity to protect themselves against HIV and Aids.
Realising the complex challenges facing African societies, especially women, SAFAIDS carried out several other studies that resulted in the publication of the recently unveiled Changing the river’s flow series casebook, comprising stories from six Zimbabwe communities on the best practices that help mitigate the HIV crisis through a cultural and gender perspective.
“While it is universally understood and accepted that traditional and cultural ideologies and practices that promote male dominance and the marginalisation of women are key drivers of the epidemic in Africa, not much is known about how to effectively address these practices in a way that will increase gender equality and reduce vulnerability to HIV for African women,” writes SAFAIDS.
The organisation, established in 1994 as a regional non-profit making organisation with a mission to promote effective and ethical development responses to the epidemic and its impact through HIV and Aids, further argues that traditional and cultural power relations are so deeply embedded in the African society that “even the most well intentioned laws and policies cannot reach them”.
Consequently and despite the availability of information on Aids people have generally not changed the way they behave.
However, strict adherence to culture, which influences attitudes and behaviours, has become an obvious death trap for African societies.
And as one author, James Baldwin, puts it, because “people who shut their eyes to reality only invite their destruction,” it has become critical for African societies to wake up to the serious reality of the devastating effects of HIV and Aids.
 In Zimbabwe, which hopes to bring down the rate of HIV and Aids infection from 15,6 percent to 10 percent in the shortest possible time, the disease is still having a destructive effect on a nation that has economically been in intensive care for over a decade.
According to the international charity organisation, Avert, one in seven adults are living with HIV and an estimated 565 adults and children are infected every day (roughly one person every three minutes). The organisation further states that in sub-Saharan Africa, people with HIV-related diseases occupy more than half of all hospital beds.
“Two-thirds of all people living with HIV are found in sub-Saharan Africa, although this region contains little more than 10 percent of the world’s population. Through its impact on the labour force, households and enterprises, Aids has played a more significant role in the reversal of human development than any other single factor,” writes Avert.