Fertility

One of the major impediments to HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa is the importance of fertility in Africa. These are some of the many reasons for the importance of fertility:

Children's labor is very important to their families and the cost of raising them is lower than the value of their labor.
Since mortality rates are higher in Africa, it is neccesary to have more children in order to ensure that some of them will survive, and to give their parents a better chance for security in their old age.
In many African societies, people are looked down upon if they don't have children.
In Western countries, condom use is one if the primary AIDS prevention methods. In Africa however, the importance of fertility makes advocating condom use less practical.

Condoms are currently the most affective method of preventing disease transmission among sexually active people, but they also prevent fertility. When working to educate people about AIDS in Africa, it is important to find ways to convince people of the importance of condoms in spite of the cultural taboos. It is also very important to find affordable vaccines, because those will help people in countries which place a high importance on fertility and don't have much money to spend on health care.
Another solution to this problem is working to change people's views through popular culture. Johns Hopkins has sponsored several programs which use popular culture to spread information. Two of these are Wake Up Africa and Hits for Hope.

Both were contests for people to write songs about AIDS education and safer sex, particularly condom use. If you go to those sights, you can see the music videos which were created from the contests. Another similar program, not run by Johns Hopkins, is Africa Alive. Programs like these target youth and help encourage a new generation to be sexually responsible and help them understand why they should work to prevent the spread of HIV through condom use in spite of cultural taboos.
Return to the Main Page

Return to the Health Page This page created by Cassandra White '00 and Krista Dandurand '01