Does social capital act as a buffer against HIV risk among migrant men in sub-Saharan Africa?

摘要

The 2005 UNAIDS data on Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) for Sub-Saharan indicated that 30 million people are living with HIV, including 3.2 million who became infected in the past twelve months. AIDS killed approximately 2.3 million people in the same year. This makes this region by far the worst affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Current interventions are designed primarily after individual-based public health models and pay little attention to the socio-economic environment in which HIV transmission occurs. This paper proposed a macro level model for understanding the spread of disease within the context of migration. It argued that stresses from migration lead to sexual interactions during the migration periods that amplify the risk of HIV transmission among migrants. Social capital theory was used to generate a framework for exploring how migration served as a conduit for the disease transmission. It specifically investigated male migrants in the Republic of Angola. It argued that migratory lifestyle introduces new social networks, norms, and lifestyles that could prove to be conducive to the spread of the HIV virus. This study used Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) to explore the relationship between migration and HIV risk while considering social capital as the intervening factor. To this end it analyzed secondary data collected on sample of migrants in Angola. Results indicated that migrants have a lower level of social capital. Although a migrant's social capital did not emerge as a significant predictor of his risky behaviors, his SES was significantly and inversely related to his risky behaviors.