"AIDS has a woman’s face": World AIDS Day events focus on gender inequality
by Amy Winter
The theme of World AIDS Day 2004 (December 1) was "Women, Girls, HIV, and AIDS." At a series of events in Washington, D.C., several organizations joined forces to draw attention to the AIDS crisis globally, specifically the rising rate of AIDS among women all over the world, and to agitate for change in the policies of the U.S. government and the World Bank that are contributing to the unchecked spread of the disease.
At a morning rally and die-in, dozens of women and girls dressed in red formed a human chain in the shape of a women's symbol outside the World Bank building in Washington, D.C., to dramatize the responsibility of World Bank structural adjustment policies in the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on women and girls globally.
A post-rally panel discussion sponsored by Foreign Policy In Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), brought together Marie Clarke Brill from Africa Action, Vineeta Gupta, a physician from Punjab, India, and Healy Thompson from the Student Global AIDS Network, to discuss the fact that globally, AIDS is a women's disease.
Latest U.N. figures reveal that the number of women with HIV/AIDS continues to increase in every region of the world. Nearly 50% of adults infected with HIV around the world are women. In Africa, that figure reaches 60%. The figure for girls is even more shocking; nearly 76% of people aged 15-24 with HIV/AIDS in Africa are female. Over 2.5 million more women are infected every year. Young women of color are about three times more vulnerable to HIV infection than men; 80% of HIV transmission in Africa is through heterosexual intercourse. Healy Thompson discussed some of the reasons behind these statistics; first, that women are biologically more susceptible to receiving the AIDS virus from men than men are to receiving it from women. Second, women are socially more susceptible to the virus, because of the prevalence of rape, genital mutilation, prostitution, and women's lesser social power to negotiate relationships and sexuality.
Dr. Gupta reports that HIV infection is increasing in India as well, and she notes that there is a significant problem with statistical underreporting. The Indian government estimates there are 3 million people with HIV in India; the World Health Organization estimate is 4 million; and Dr. Gupta believes the actual number could be 5 million or even greater.
Although the World Bank is a major contributor to programs aimed at combating AIDS in the developing world, these efforts are undermined by World Bank loan conditions and debt repayment demands that perpetuate women's poverty and inequality, which in turn promote the continued transmission of HIV. For example, Dr. Gupta reports that in India, the privatization of health care is a major problem. Often a requirement for World Bank assistance, health care privatization means that health care goes from being free to being something that must be purchased. It thus becomes unaffordable for the majority of people.
A similar problem exists in Africa, where the World Bank requires governments of many countries to charge fees for services like education and health care as a condition of receiving assistance, in order to raise money to pay interest on loans from institutions in the United States. In the developing world, many countries spend just $5 a year per person on health care as scarce funds are used to pay down international debt. Few of those infected with AIDS have any chance of getting access to the drug regimen required for survival. When school costs money, girls and young women often cannot continue their studies. When health care costs money, many people go without. When the price of food and other necessities increases, to raise more money to service foreign debt, women are often the ones who must turn to work in factories, sweatshops, or prostitution to feed their families--all situations where they are at social, economic and physical risk of harm and contracting the AIDS virus.
In addition, foreign aid is also often conditional on budget caps or ceilings, which means that governments can only spend a certain amount on social services, regardless of the actual needs of the population. In some cases, this results in governments having to turn down grants and other funds that would cause an overrun of the budget ceilings set by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. All of these policies are based on the Western capitalist ideology of a market economy, where basic life needs and human services must be purchased rather than being a social right. We know first-hand the problems this belief system has caused in our own country. The ideological bias of the programs inhibits the ability of countries to create systems that make sense for the specific conditions and obstacles they face. In addition, much of the international debt that burdens developing countries is considered illegitimate, in the loans were made to corrupt government leaders who used the money for their own enrichment that of their friends, rather than for the betterment of the country as a whole. It is unfair to require an impoverished population to continue servicing this debt, and that is why organizations like AfricaAction and the Student Global AIDS Campaign are pushing for debt cancellation.
When foreign debt has been cancelled in the past, it has been demonstrated that governments do turn resources to poverty relief and infrastructure development, and that citizen groups have arisen to call the governments to account on how funds are used. The campaign for debt cancellation has been successful to some degree, in that the major grantors of foreign aid have agreed in principle to debt cancellation, though there is currently no plan in place for how this will actually happen. The Student Global AIDS Campaign has called for an 8,000-person march on Washington, D.C., on February 26, 2005, for Youth AIDS Day, to draw attention to the ongoing epidemic of HIV/AIDS and the role of the World Bank policies in perpetuating the conditions which foster HIV transmission.