“Women now account for half of the 33 million people living with HIV around the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the world’s people living with HIV, women are even harder hit, making up 60 percent of those infected. Not only are women biologically more susceptible than men to HIV, many behavioral and social factors play into women’s vulnerability.
If a young woman is uninfected with HIV at the time of her marriage, traditional wisdom says that she has avoided the disease altogether. More and more, however, research shows …

Disco funerals or “Disco Matanga” in Swahili is a phenomenon observed in the municipality in Nyanza Province on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, East Africa. These parties are organised at night, bring together the family of the deceased, their relatives, and are an important place for young people to hang out.
The phenomenon is poorly documented but in an article published in AIDS, Carolyne Njue and colleagues conducted 44 in-depth interviews with male and female adolescents aged 15–20 years in Kisumu and observed six disco funerals. They …

Jaboya is a form of bartering observed on the coast of Kenya where a customer is also a lover. Men fish and women buy the fish to sell on the market. A woman without a boyfriend or a male partner would not be able to obtain fish. Women with limited income therefore offer sex to fishermen in exchange for fish. Fishermen on the other hand have a lot of choice and often more than one customer, and hence are involved in a network of sexual encounters fuelling the HIV …