Sandra Tembo walks past a billboard on her way to Mbare vegetable market in Harare, Zimbabwe, that gives advice she says friends can’t afford to follow: “Your future is brighter without a sugar daddy.”

“I’m sure they realize the risk,” Tembo, a 20-year-old dressmaking student, said of the friends. “But they say being broke all the time also has its dangers, as you could starve.”

African girls who sell themselves for sex to older men, known as sugar daddies, are fueling an AIDS epidemic in Sub- Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of all people infected with the HIV virus. Young women in the region have HIV infection rates three times higher than young men: 3.4 percent of women aged 15 to 24 and 1.4 percent for men in the same age group.

Now the World Bank is proposing to pay girls like Tembo’s friends as an incentive to keep them in school and prevent AIDS. Cash may be the “ethical policy instrument” of the 21st century, said Mead Over, a health economist at the Center for Global Development, a research organization in Washington.

Read more from Bloomberg.com

This entry was posted on March 15th, 2011 at 11:22 am by Bev Clark and is filed under Inspiration, Uncategorized, Women's issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.