When the South Asia Development Marketplace for innovative ideas to tackle stigma and discrimination relating to HIV/AIDS was launched in November 2007 by the HIV/AIDS Group in the South Asia Region of the World Bank and its partners, civil society groups across South Asia sent in almost a thousand proposals.
People fear HIV/AIDS because of the association with sex, drugs, illness, and death. In South Asia, the epidemic is driven largely by high risk practices – buying and selling sex, injecting drugs, and unprotected sex among men having sex with men. This compounds the fear and stigma around HIV/AIDS, as sex workers, injecting drug users, and men having sex with men are already stigmatized.
Not only in South Asia, but around the globe, efforts to prevent new HIV infections and allowing people with HIV/AIDS to live without the burden of social exclusion are severely hampered by the persistence of stigma. One study in India shows that 36% percent of students, faculty and technical staff of the public health services felt it would be better if HIV-positive individuals killed themselves and believed that infected people deserved their fate; 34% would not associate with people with AIDS; 42% believed that those with HIV should be quarantined; and, 31% favored barring infected students from college classes (Ambati, Ambati & Rao, 1997).
How is the quest to end poverty in South Asia going? Parts of the subcontinent, such as the Maldives, the Western Province of Sri Lanka or some Indian states have already “eliminated” abject poverty (in the sense of having poverty rates below 10 percent). Other parts of South Asia such as Afghanistan or northern Sri Lanka are so mired in violent and escalating conflict that ending poverty seems a remote dream; providing basic security seems much more important.
Mariam Claeson
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