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Empowering women: The milestone towards combating HIV/AIDS
Mbonisi Zikhali, Women’s Coalition
Extracted from E-Coalition newsletter
June 27, 2006

The vulnerability of women in the face of HIV/AIDS is a serious threat to food security in Southern Africa. For people heavily reliant on women’s maternal instincts, the pandemic foretells disastrous prospects for the region’s development if there are no determined efforts to empower them. If traditional power systems are not revised as thoroughly as the scale of the problem entails the numbers of both the infected and the affected will continue to rise.

Save the Children (UK) and Oxfam International explain in their December 2002 "HIV/AIDS and Food Insecurity in Southern Africa" review how traditional power relations between men and women make women and adolescent girls less able to negotiate concerns about their sexuality. This stems from the patriarchal nature of society, which naturally denies relative access and control of resources to women. On the contrary, the burden of care is still borne by women, who constitute the main source of agricultural subsistence labour. The review further states that HIV-infected households can register a marked decrease of up to 60% in food production as the woman’s attention is diverted from tilling to taking care of the HIV-infected family members. For HIV-infected women, the stigma and discrimination goes to the undesirable extremes of possible eviction once status is disclosed. This means that provision for food becomes a laborious task once they have been eliminated from a potential support system.

The lack of information on HIV/AIDS, particularly for the poor Southern African woman is worsened by illiteracy. This is often the outcome of male dominion over their offspring’s access or alienation from education. Moreover, in the event of an HIV-positive member falling sick, care giving is naturally deemed a priority over prolonging studies for a school-going female. Such disempowerment has severe long-term consequences. Left with no alternative ways to supplement income for food, women and girls resort to transactional sex. Refugees International, an advocacy organization offering humanitarian assistance and protection to displaced people across the world, reports that in Zimbabwe’s rural areas women and girls are resorting to transactional sex with income earners like gold panners to maintain their food security. These desperate measures in themselves fuel HIV/AIDS. The fear of hunger offers these women and girls the ill-advised rationale for risking infection.

Therefore it is necessary that women’s role in the fight against HIV/AIDS be acknowledged. Their experiences can serve as the barometer for spreading the correct information as to how both men and women can collectively act in combating the disease. The juggling act of food procurement and care giving which women are compelled to endure also needs to be highlighted. It needs to be conceded that without access and control to all technical resources that make care giving possible, then women cannot be expected to shoulder such a burden HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, it should not be implied in any efforts made in combating the disease, that is incumbent on women only to administer care.

Access and control can be in the form of reviewing inheritance laws that bar women from holding land or livestock upon the death of their husbands. An August 2004 UNAIDS fact sheet entitled "Women, Girls and HIV/AIDS In Zimbabwe" points out that in Zimbabwe, inheritance laws unfavourable to widows were amended in 1997. However, it further states that in the Magaya vs Magaya casein 1999 the Supreme Court ruled that under customary law a man’s claim to family inheritance takes precedence over a woman’s. This makes it difficult for a woman to maintain food security for the children left in her care.

In 2004 the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) also commissioned the South African AIDS Law Project to assess the human rights and gender issues in South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and Zimbabwe. It was discovered that although most of these countries (with the exception of Swaziland) had either ratified or consented to the Convention of the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, some common and customary law does not often promote human research program at the HSRC says customary law does not often promote human rights. "It emphasizes status, duties and community valued, whereas human rights provisions emphasis individual rights, freedoms and equality….’ (HRSC Media Brief: Gender and HIV/AIDS – Focus on Southern Africa, 2004).

This is only one dimension to countless possibilities in the fight to empower women in Southern Africa. Women’s institutions should be encouraged and funded at grassroots level and gender education should be the core subject, in relation to the legal and social concerns that arise when confronted by the pandemic. Self-employment skills should also be encouraged skills should also be encouraged, so as to tear away from subservience brought about by dependence. Women’s care giving nature should not be taken for granted. It is everyone’s responsibility to combat HIV/AIDS. Empowering women is the first step to disempowering HIV/AIDS.

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