Communities Facing the HIV/AIDS Challenge: From Crisis to Opportunity

From a South East Asian perspective, this paper reviews the challenges of HIV/AIDS issues in rural communities. According to the authors, "rural households are managing as best they can in a rapidly changing and often threatening world which makes them vulnerable to the risk of HIV infection and ill equipped to cope with the effects of AIDS."

The paper outlines a variety of constraints faced by farm households and issues such as time and energy limitations created by HIV/AIDS-provoked shortages. "The paper highlights the potential contributions of various labor saving technologies (LSTs) could provide while also stressing the conditions - including gender ones - which have to be met in order to introduce LSTs successfully. LSTs are a partial solution to HIV/AIDS problems, but also represent a challenge to the way agriculture is practiced and to common policies in both agriculture and HIV/AIDS."

This paper makes the case that communities need to build their own resilience if they are to prove effective allies for rural households. It contends that such a task is feasible as long as certain conditions are met and potential pitfalls are avoided. The authors draw from global and African experiences and highlight some of the challenges of the region.