Social Sciences
and HIV/AIDS in Africa
This is a
collaborative initiative between Union of African Population
Studies and CODESRIA. This initiative, which has received
continual support by Sida/SAREC, places emphasis on the
importance of strengthening social science research on and
understanding of the HIV/AIDs pandemic ravaging the African
continent. The idea that underpins the Sida/SAREC initiative are
broadly shared by CODESRIA which, in its own Strategic Plan
Document for the period 2002 – 2006, had identified the theme of
Politics, Health and Society as one of the areas on which its
intellectual agenda would be focused and as an umbrella under
which targeted intellectual and/or policy research interventions
on HIV/AIDS could be undertaken.
The activities of
this initiative were kick started by a call for proposal, where
emphasis was placed on the urgency of the challenges of
developing a comprehensive Social Science approach to
understanding and responding to the HIV/AIDs pandemic in a
manner which contributes, to knowledge about the trajectory of
the disease, the impact which it is having, the adaptive/coping
mechanisms (being) developed by communities and processes of
social change associated with the pandemic. The call also
outlined the importance of analyzing the policy alternatives,
which are available and which could be better adapted to the
challenges of managing the problem beyond the current solutions
on offer
Activities:
Methodological workshop 16th – 17th
January, 2003.
The main accent
of the methodological workshop was placed on a collective effort
at defining and operationalising what it means to develop a
social science approach to HIV/AIDs research in Africa. The
definition of a social scientific approach which was arrived at
centred, in broad terms, around the need for and the application
of a multidisciplinary, historically grounded perspective, which
is designed to capture the basic relations of a social, economic
and political kind that define the context for the pandemic, the
vulnerability profile of individuals/groups, the capacity of
communities and individuals to cope with and respond to the
pandemic, the pattern of governmental response and the overall
social and individual capacity to overcoming the disease Another
accent of the methodological workshop was placed on
understanding social relations and power relations. The point of
departure was that various variables of power, including the
distribution of power, will constitute an important investment
in advancing a social science perspective on the disease.
Furthermore, the arena of state-society relations, including
questions of citizenship, rights, associational life/the nature
of civil society, governmental capacity and state/governmental
legitimacy constituted critical questions to an understanding of
social relations
A CODESRIA agenda
that emerged from the methodological workshop was to make a
rights based approach that emphasizes the experiences of the
patients. Around this problematique was how the welfare
and rights of patients as citizens could be mobilised and
secured in an era characterized by among other things, official
and unofficial prejudices/stigmas against AIDS sufferers, the
diminished health budgets of African states, the equally
diminished health delivery capacity of governments, and the high
cost of anti-retrovirals.
Revised papers from this methodological seminar can be
downloaded following the link
