• UNIFEM / Gender Issues / HIV/AIDS

Facts & Figures on HIV/AIDS

Global and Regional Statistics

Worldwide Trends

• In 2003, 17 million women and 18.7 million men between the ages of 15 and 49 are living with HIV/AIDS [1].
• Young women are 1.6 times more likely to be living with HIV than young men. Young women make up over 60% of 15-24-year-olds living with HIV [1].
• The overwhelming majority of people with HIV/AIDS — 98% of women and 94% of men — live in developing countries [1].
• In 2003, there were an estimated 15 million AIDS orphans around the world [1], expected to increase to 25 million by 2010 [2].

Regional Patterns

• Of all regions, sub-Saharan Africa is the most devastated by the epidemic. No other region approaches its prevalence rates or displays such a disproportionate impact on women and girls: 77% of all HIV-positive women live in sub-Saharan Africa [2].
• In 1985, roughly 0.5 million men and 0.5 million women in sub-Saharan Africa were living with HIV/AIDS. In 2003, 23 million adults between the ages of 15 and 49 were living with HIV/AIDS — 57% or 13.1 million of which are women. Young women aged 15-24 are now more than 3 times more likely to be infected than young men [2].
• The Asia region, where 7.4 million people are living with HIV, could become the epicenter of the pandemic in the next decade, with China and India — the world's two most populous nations — facing a potential AIDS catastrophe. Until now the mode of transmission in Asia has been mainly through injecting drug use and sex work. But the spread from high-risk groups to the wider population is growing, with Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand already dealing with serious epidemics. There is growing evidence that HIV transmission between spouses has become a more prominent cause of new infections [2].
• By the end of 2003, about 1.3 million people in the Eastern European and Central Asian region were living with HIV, with over a quarter of a million people newly infected in 2003 alone. Women account for about 33% of people with HIV in the region [2].
• In 2003, nearly 2 million people between the ages of 15 and 49 were living with HIV in Latin America and the Caribbean. 49% of all infected adults in the Caribbean are women, with young women 2.5 times more likely to be infected than young men [2].
• In North America, where the epidemic is thought to be under control due to the general availability of antiretroviral therapy (ART), women's prevalence rates jumped 5% between 2001 and 2003 — the largest increase among women in any region of the world [2]. The epidemic has increased most dramatically among women of colour — African American and Hispanic women together accounted for 80% of AIDS cases reported among women in 2000 [3].

Prevention, Knowledge and Behaviour

• Many young women do not know how HIV/AIDS is transmitted or that condom use can prevent HIV transmission. Only 50% of young women surveyed in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa know these facts; for CEE/CIS countries the figure is 43%, and for Latin America and the Caribbean it is 25% [4].
• In Cambodia and Vietnam, 30% of young women surveyed from 1998 to 2003 believed that HIV could be contracted by supernatural means, while nearly 35% of those polled believed that a healthy-looking person was immune to infection [4].
• Marriage is proving to be a serious risk factor for HIV infection for women. Studies in Kenya and Zambia have shown that younger married women are at a higher risk of HIV infection than their unmarried counterparts [5].
• Brazil, which runs one of the world's most successful anti-HIV campaigns, has helped lower HIV infection rates more than threefold between 1997 and 2001 [6].

Treatment

• Of the 1 million people receiving AIDS treatment worldwide, the overwhelming majority live in wealthy countries. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, only about 3% of people in need of treatment received ART in 2003 [7].
• In Botswana, where treatment through the public health system is available to anyone who needs it, women are utilizing testing and treatment services at greater rates than men [8].
• In 2003, only 1% of pregnant women in countries heavily affected by AIDS had access to testing and treatment [9].

Care-Giving

• Much of the increased poverty in female-headed households is directly related to care-giving responsibilities — many AIDS widows for example, are young with dependent children, limiting their ability to contribute to farm work and earn a living. Female-headed households also tend to have more children, including AIDS orphans, than male-headed households [10].

Education

• New analysis suggests that if all children received a complete primary education, around 700,000 cases of HIV in young adults could be prevented each year — 7 million in a decade [11].
• In 17 countries in Africa and 4 in Latin America, studies showed that better-educated girls tended to delay having sex and were more likely to insist that their partner use a condom [12].
• Despite overwhelming evidence of education's importance in helping to curb the spread of HIV, a recent worldwide study revealed that about 40% of countries have not yet taken the basic step of including AIDS information in their school curriculum [13].

Violence

• A recent South African study has revealed that women beaten and/or dominated by their partners are about twice as likely to become infected by HIV as those who are not [14].
• In the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo, some 60% of the militia who roam the countryside are thought to be HIV-positive, spreading infection through rape to women and girls. And virtually none of the women have access to services and care [15].
• In a survey conducted by AVEGA, the Association of Genocide Widows, out of 1,125 women survivors of rape during the Rwandan genocide, 70% are HIV-positive [16].

Women's Rights

• Child marriage puts girls at risk for HIV infection. Worldwide, 82 million girls, mostly from poor families, will marry before their 18th birthday and face a higher probability of becoming infected with HIV than their unmarried peers [17].
• A Ugandan study of HIV-positive widows revealed that 90% of the women interviewed had property disputes with their in-laws, and 88% of those in rural areas were unable to meet their household needs [18].
• Women who are HIV-positive tend to be particularly vulnerable. Women widowed by AIDS or found to be positive themselves may be cast out of their homes or returned to their parents' home without their dowry, making it difficult for their parents to support them. A 1995 Bangladesh survey showed that only 32% of widows received their rightful share of inheritance from their husbands [19].

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