Global Research in Gender, Sexuality and Health – serie

This book addresses the ongoing problem of HIV in black South African women as a health inequity. Importantly, it argues that this urgent problem of justice is changeable. Sprague uses the capabilities approach to bring a theory of health justice, together with multiple sources of evidence, to investigate the complex problem of HIV and accompanying poor health outcomes in black South African women. Motivated by a concern for application of knowledge, this work discusses how to better conceptualise what health justice demands of state and society, and how to mobilise available evidence on health inequities in ways that compel greater state action to address problems of gender and health. HIV in women, and possible responses, are investigated on four distinct levels: conceptual, social structure, health systems, and law. The analysis demonstrates that this problem is indeed modifiable with long-term interventions and an enhanced state response targeted at multiple levels.  This book will be of interest to academics and students in the social health sciences, gender and development studies, and global health, as well as HIV/health activists, government officials, policy makers, HIV clinicians and health providers interested in HIV.

This book provides a clear and detailed examination of why it is so difficult to secure comprehensive political engagement and actionable, effective policy on sexual and reproductive health rights in sub-Saharan Africa. In an engaging analysis, Nana Poku employs expert knowledge to examine the prospects for large-scale improvements. He explores not only the full range of normative sensitivities, but also conceptual misunderstandings, legal difficulties and complex challenges of securing and maintaining adequate funding while AIDS remains a pandemic in the region. Up-to-date, succinct yet highly detailed, lucid and compelling in its diagnoses of highly complex issues, this book is a valuable, accessible study of a topic that is regional in focus but with clear global implications.