BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

About a decade and a half ago, Anthony Zwi and Antonio Jorge Cabral argued that we needed a new term – they suggested ‘high-risk situation’ – to describe the range of social, economic and political forces that place groups at particularly high risk of HIV infection (1991). They culled a number of features from a variety of settings in order to characterise these high-risk situations: impoverishment and disenfranchisement, rapid urbanisation, the anonymity of urban life, labour migration, Read the rest of this entry »

In a highly significant paper, Nicoli Nattrass uses regression analyses to show that today ’simply being a southern African country increases HIV prevalence massively and significantly’. HIV prevalence, she says, ‘is eighteen times higher for southern African countries’ than anywhere else with similar levels of poverty and inequality (n.d.; emphasis in original). This is all the more striking because throughout the 1980s, as South Africans were engaged in the final struggle against apartheid, Read the rest of this entry »