In Africa, AIDS has a Womens Face

Erik Johnson
English 250 FD
Mr. Perez
April 5, 2009
AIDS is a disease destroying Africa. This disease is destroying the most powerful people in Africa, the women. Women control the small rural communities and they are the reason that those communities survive.
Kofi Annan writes about the struggles that these women face in his article titled “In Africa, AIDS Has a Woman’s Face.” Annan states that in every study ever conducted has shown that there is no aspect of African development that women do not play a central role. Today, millions of African women are threatened by two afflictions: AIDS and famine. According to Annana’s article over 30 million people are at risk of starvation in southern Africa. All of the southern agricultural societies are also battling the AIDS epidemic. Annan says that because of AIDS, rural societies are falling apart, agricultural development is disintegrating quickly, and household income is shrinking. AIDS has killed almost 2.5 million Africans the year that this article was published in 2003 and left 11 million African children orphaned sense the start of this epidemic. AIDS is causing a dangerous and ever growing snowball effect according to Annan. A woman will often have to take care of a sick husband, which means that she has a lesser amount of time to plant her fields and harvesting. When her husband dies, she cannot use credit and deprived of the right to own land Annan states. Then when she dies the house will possibly collapse. Which in turn the older children will be taken out of school and deprived a good education to work in the home or farm.
Annan pushes that because this crisis is different from past famines, we must look beyond old relief techniques. He says that we must combine food assistance and new approaches to farming with treatment and prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS. It will require an early warning monitoring system and new agricultural techniques that will work for a hindered work force. Most importantly Annan says that we must inform the people about H.I.V. and AIDS so that we can prevent the spread because of ignorance of the disease.
There is hope. Recent United Nations reports show that H.I.V. infection rates in Uganda continue to decline. In South Africa, infections in women under 20 have begun to decline at a steady pace. Annan encourages that we must build on the successes that we have had and replicate them elsewhere around the world. If we wish to save Africa we must save the women.