African Women Confront Bush's AIDS Policy

Rebecca Lolosoli radiates a quiet authority beneath layers of elaborate beadwork that cover her forehead, neck, chest, and wrists. She smiles readily while addressing an audience of U.S. college students, though to them, her topic is a metaphor for hopelessness. Rebecca is talking about AIDS in Africa, specifically among women in her indigenous, Samburu village of Umoja, Kenya. "For years, people were dying and we did not know why," she recalls. "Now we know that AIDS can be avoided, but only by making great changes in our lives."

Thanks largely to the work of African public-health and social-justice advocates like Rebecca, growing numbers of people around the world know that sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic: three-quarters of AIDS deaths worldwide have been in Africa, and today the continent is home to nearly two-thirds of all of those who are HIV-positive (more than 25 million people). 1 Fewer people know that most Africans living with HIV/AIDS are women, and that young women are now being infected at a rate three to four times higher than young men. 2 For many, this information is absorbed through a mesh of stereotypes that make human misery seem like a natural condition of life in Africa .

But while AIDS-like the litany of this year's natural disasters-may have originated in nature, the magnitude of its destruction is a man-made catastrophe. Consider the following:

· Since the 1980s when AIDS first emerged, the United States has demanded "economic austerity measures" in impoverished countries. In Africa , these policies cut national health budgets in half just when public health systems needed to be ramped up to combat AIDS. 3 Today, the pandemic is the single greatest obstacle to economic development in Africa .

· To bolster already-huge profits of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, the Bush administration has blocked the sale of affordable generic drugs that have saved millions of lives in rich countries.

· Women are made particularly vulnerable to HIV infection because they are denied the rights to refuse sex or insist on condom use. As the majority of those living in poverty and the poorest of the poor, women are more likely to contract HIV and more likely to develop symptoms of AIDS soon after they are infected.

AIDS, unjust economic policies, and women's inequality are mutually reinforcing crises; combating any one of these requires addressing them together. But too often, public health programs, government policies, and even activists compartmentalize issues, missing critical points of inter-connection that are keys to effecting change.

One reason for this myopia is that a singular focus on AIDS as a naturally occurring scourge allows policymakers to avoid tackling tough social issues like economic justice and gender equality. Take the relationship between AIDS and women's property rights in Kenya. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Kenyan women are widowed by AIDS. Because Kenyan laws and customs bar women from owning and inheriting property, women and their children are often forcibly displaced from their homes when their husbands die. Displacement increases women's risk of contracting HIV by exposing them to poverty, homelessness, violence, and disease, sometimes compelling them to trade sex for food and shelter. Protecting women's property rights is an urgent component of HIV/AIDS prevention strategies. But safeguarding these rights entails challenging law and tradition and spotlighting volatile issues related to land tenure and distribution of resources in an impoverished country.

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