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Rural women carry family sorrows and burdens
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Social and economic impacts of the HIV/AIDS pandemic disproportionately affect women, exacerbating the vulnerability of poor, rural women in particular, according to studies carried out in eastern Africa.
Women are most likely to carry the main burden of caring for the sick and dying. And since HIV/AIDS is above all a sexually transmitted disease, very often several people in one household can be affected.
In Ugandan districts studied, more households are headed by AIDS widows than widowers, and widows with dependent children can quickly become entrenched in poverty. All family assets and savings, which in most cases are meagre before the onset of the disease, may be completely spent, leaving the surviving family members without means of support.
And any access to land, credit and support services -- more often than not male privileges -- that could see these women through the hard times are denied them because of their inferior social and legal status in traditionally patriarchal rural societies.
HIV/AIDS carries a stigma and many women are ostracized. Help from the extended family and the community, their main safety nets, is often severed.
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But who will take care of the women when they fall sick with the disease? The likelihood of which is growing. For a combination of biological and social reasons, women are more than twice as likely to be infected by men than the reverse. And the outlook is even bleaker for the future generation.
UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS, has reported that in countries where young people from 15 to 24 years old account for as much as 60 percent of all new infections, infected young women between 15 and 19 years old outnumber their infected male peers by an alarming ratio of 2 to 1.
The impact of HIV/AIDS on traditional coping mechanisms in rural communities
