Women's careers in low income areas as indicators of country and town dynamics

A great deal of research and comments have been made about African urban male migrants who leave the villages because of economic insecurities, which most often include unemployment, under employment and under productiveness of land. Little is known about the female migrants, except that they are prostitutes. This study is a contribution t o the research vacuum that exists with regards to African female migrants: and the efforts have been concentrated on the Namuwongo-Wabigalo area. An attempt has been made to find out what women do when they come to urban areas. Economic insecurity seems t o be a dominant factor behind almost every reason that the women give for leaving the rural areas. It has been observed that women discover that hard work and self-reliance are useful assets to have in the urban environment as well, where life is based on a money economy. The material in this study is arranged around the question of how women support themselves. The women that have been studied are largely uneducated and therefore possess hardly any to warrant their employment in the industries or in government created jobs; they have no alternative but to be self-employed. They are overlooked by planners and other people, particularly men, competing for formal j obs. This makes the informal sector invisible, and it is not surprising that people operating in this sector are usually labelled lazy and apathetic. Namuwonga-Wabigalo area is one of those called low income areas of Kampala. This is misleading because it implies that the residents are poor or unemployed. Yet the area is categorized so because the migrants who are in formal jobs receive a salary of not more than 500/-. The data suggests that residents of the so called low income areas are not necessarily of the bottom of the income scale. It has been observed that women are playing an important role in nation building or economic development, by for example feeding the workers and building lodging houses. Women are striving t o be socially and economically independent of men; and the findings indicate that they are very much concerned about their individuality as persons an

Logics of Affordability and Worth: Gendered Consumption in Rural Uganda

This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the “responsible” category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what is deemed necessary, affordable, and responsible. Moral obligation is differentially distributed between genders: women are deemed responsible for household expenditure, their personal consumption preferences constrained, whereas men are able to delimit a sphere of personal consumption separate from the household, with limited accountability to its moral requirements. The gendered nature of power relations is thus revealed both in the apportioning of moral duty and in the construction of affordability through which consumption is enabled

Introduction

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67161/2/10.1177_0308275X9301300401.pd

HIV transmission through social and geographical networks in Uganda

Long distance drivers and prostitutes at trading centres and towns have been targeted as groups that engage in risky sexual behaviours that promote HIV transmission. While towns and stops along highways have been linked to HIV transmission, the role of small urban and rural centres have been overlooked. There is need to study socio-geographical mating networks because situations not deemed to be risky may be an important aspect of HIV transmission.HIV mating network socio-geographical proximity Uganda

Vivre et penser le SIDA en Afrique

The contributions selected have been reordered in three main groups, whose titles only partly reflect the titles of the themes that had been set forth initially. 1. Methodological and disciplinary issues. Importance of disciplinary questionings for understanding AIDS. 2. Social constructions and implications of AIDS. 3. Social sciences, support and prevention of AIDS