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The
Hughes Science Pipeline Project
presents
Distinguished
Women in Science: A Lecture Series
Women and HIV/AIDS
by Helene Gayle
President and CEO, CARE USA
11 April 2006
Julius S. Held Lecture Hall, Barnard Hall
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CARE USA is launching a new “I Am Powerful”
campaign on global women and poverty issues. The goal is to empower
women and address health inequities that affect us all. Empowering
women is not about helping women vs. helping men. Instead women are
seen as a point of entry. Since it is more common for women to
channel their resources into the well-being of the household,
investing in them is the best way to guarantee the future of the
family and the community. We already know, for example, that the
longer a girl stays in school, the higher her family income as an
adult, and the fewer and healthier children she will have.
Women and girls make up 75 percent of the poorest people in the
world today. Any lasting solution to poverty means improving women’s
conditions and rights–including the right to education, the right to
consensual marriage, and the right to inherit property. Women
produce half the world’s food, but own only one percent of its
farmland. Each year, more than 500,000 women –at least one every
minute– die from pregnancy-related causes. Of 876 million illiterate
adults in the developing world, two-thirds are women; 150 million
children are not in primary school and 60 percent of these are
girls.
Female-Controlled AIDS Prevention Strategies is central concern of
CARE USA. Women are more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS – biologically,
economically, and socioculturally (especially in Africa) – so there
is an urgent need for female-controlled prevention methods. Young
women, who carry the double burden of dire poverty and gender
discrimination, now account for 76 percent of African youth living
with HIV/AIDS. A variety of viable methods for preventing sexual
transmission of HIV/AIDS and treating its symptoms are now being
studied. |
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